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The Missing Middle in

OXFAM
RESEARCH
REPORT
Agricultural Finance
Relieving the capital constraint on smallholder
groups and other agricultural SMEs

17 December 2009
Alan Doran, independent consultant on SME
finance

Ntongi McFadyen, independent management


consultant

Dr Robert C. Vogel, independent financial


sector consultant

Disclaimer
This paper was written by Alan Doran, Ntongi McFadyen, and Robert Vogel
who were working as consultants to Oxfam GB. The views expressed in the
text and its recommendations are those of the authors. The authors take
responsibility for any errors herein.

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Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
Contents

Executive summary ....................................................................................................... 4

1. Introduction ......................................................................................................... 8

2. Why the middle is missing ............................................................................. 11

3. The lack of effective demand ......................................................................... 13

4. Capital suppliers and their constraints......................................................... 17

5. The evolution of financial and risk management services ....................... 24

6. Improving the infrastructure for financial services ................................... 34

7. The private sector and the missing middle.................................................. 37

8. Summary and conclusions .............................................................................. 41

Notes .............................................................................................................................. 45

Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................... 0

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Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
Executive summary

Addressing costs and risks to improve capital supply


So far the private sector has made only small progress in responding to the needs of, and
opportunities in, the market segment of small-scale agricultural enterprises, after the
widespread withdrawal of the paradigm of government funded and controlled
agricultural development. The unmet needs for finance of producer associations and
other forms of SMEs (small- and medium-sized enterprises) in agriculture, for
transactions in the size range 5,000 to 500,000, constitute the missing middle. The
crucial issue is how to overcome the barriers to scaling-up the private sectors response.
Rural households typically adopt a diversified strategy for survival including non-
agricultural activities making microcredit, offered in tiny amounts and over short terms,
a financial product that can be viable in terms of costs, risks, and returns. By contrast,
small- and medium-scale agricultural activities are exposed to a narrower range of crop,
market and other risks, including those internal to the business. Appraising and
monitoring loans to SMEs requires analysis of all aspects of the enterprise. Because loans
are larger and longer-term, lenders also require collateral or other more formal
guarantees. Transaction costs are thus much higher. These costs can be recovered from
interest rate margins and fees but only if loans are large enough. In many cases,
agricultural SMEs are too small to absorb this quantity of external capital; hence the
missing middle.
Equity investors need higher returns to compensate for the higher costs and risks in
primary agriculture. Up to now, nearly all other sectors have been much more attractive,
even for socially-oriented funds.
Transaction costs for lenders and investors, as well as some risks, will diminish with
improvements in the infrastructure of the financial sector. A complementary approach is
to extend the use of collateral substitutes such as leasing, factoring, and contract finance.
Local lenders, whether commercial banks, rural financial co-operatives, or larger
microfinance institutions (MFIs), have the advantage of knowing the immediate business
environment for SME agriculture, but may find it hard to diversify risk. Even then, they
need access to affordable external liquidity for survival during the inevitable bad times in
their localities.
The promise of index-based weather insurance as a mechanism for transferring and
pooling risk is large, and expectations are high. However, the difficulty of obtaining data
is underestimated, the lead times are long, and the affordability is in question. Climate
change is steadily increasing risk, reducing the scope of the insurance approach.
Nationwide lenders, including larger commercial banks and agricultural development
banks, are better diversified the latter to a lesser extent but often lack systems for
effectively delegating decisions to local rural branches. Many agricultural development
banks need substantial reform in this and other respects before they can make a strong
contribution.
Government imposed interest-rate ceilings and subsidised interest rates should be
avoided: they usually result in rent-seekers or other larger-scale borrowers capturing the
limited credit available, and are inherently unsustainable. Crucially they also crowd out
sustainable private-sector initiatives.
Risk-sharing, through partial credit guarantees, is a more promising approach, since it
works with the grain of the private sector. It encourages commercial banks to enter the

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Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
market for longer-term finance for enterprise development. The new generation of
guarantors include powerful philanthropic foundations, international finance
institutions, and banks with a special interest in agricultural development, such as
Rabobank. Their contracts with banks have features that should produce outcomes better
than those of historic government guarantee funds.
Because the pay-off is so much more certain than intervening directly in the market for
finance, and the goods and services supplied are public goods, government and donor
resources are better directed to supporting infrastructure improvements, both for the
financial sector and outside it.

Releasing effective demand


As well as supply, effective demand for missing middle finance is also constrained. Only
one third of smallholders are aggregated in some form of group enterprise, appropriate
for larger transactions. Individual farmers with more land, employing labour, will not
take on the risk of debt, unless they have access also to savings and insurance products.
Formal collateral is frequently lacking.
Women farmers suffer from educational discrimination, limited mobility, lack of land
rights, and restrictive social norms. They are virtually excluded from agricultural credit
and extension services. This is despite heading up one in five farms, and being capable of
achieving gains in productivity as large, if not larger, than men farmers.
Producer associations of both women and men often lack organisational capacity, a
business culture, and specific finance-management skills, making them unacceptable as
potential borrowers or investees.
A range of (mainly) non-profit actors offering technical assistance, often bundled with
brokering access to external finance, or actual financial supply, is addressing these
constraints. It includes specialised business development NGOs (non-government
organisations) and bank-linked foundations. However, these efforts are usually focused
on easier market segments involving high-value export commodities or Fair Trade
goods, and relatively large transactions.
Poverty-focused NGOs such as Oxfam are also making a contribution through capacity
building of very small co-operative businesses and introducing them to finance
suppliers. This is an element of livelihoods programming, often working with
disadvantaged women in remote areas.
Much of the external capital is required to finance fertiliser; other chemical inputs;
irrigation and spraying equipment; and costly seed varieties in order to raise yields and
incomes. A knowledge-based LEIT (low external input technologies) approach can also
raise productivity, but often more slowly. Apart from needing less capital, it can be better
for the environment, including climate change mitigation and adaptation, and for social
development. On the other hand, LEIT agriculture requires efficient delivery of
education and extension services, itself a major challenge. The existence of the LEIT
alternative is a reminder that maximising the application of capital, or the effective
demand for it, is not always the correct approach, and can exaggerate the size of the
missing middle gap.

Improving infrastructure financial and non-financial


Collateral contracts are the normal accompaniment to lending. Therefore changes in the
regulatory and administrative environment, allowing more flexibility; ease of operation;
and lower costs are important. Among these are the availability of independent services
recording legal ownership of items and their location; working markets for land in rural

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Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
areas; allowing collateralisation of debts owed to the enterprise; crops in various stages
of processing; and personal property such as jewellery.
For all types of finance, the availability of credit history reduces the lenders risk. Thus
credit information bureaux are valuable, and can be made, with the right regulations and
incentive structures for financiers, to cover the smallest loans in rural areas.
Bank reluctance to lend to SMEs will be lessened if risk-based supervision replaces the
traditional, inflexible approach based solely on the presence of correct documentation,
resulting in inaccurate and excessive provisioning. The new basis means assessing a
lenders ability to manage risks systematically, in particular the risks that come from the
challenges of diversification over new sectors and from the delegation of decisions to
local levels.
Local financial suppliers, such as small commercial banks, rural financial co-operatives,
or larger MFIs can benefit from apex organisations or their equivalent, as centres to their
networks, which can diversify risk and provide emergency liquidity. Donors and
governments can make further contributions to institutional strengthening of this kind.
There is more to be done by national governments, supported by multilateral donors, in
reforming national agricultural development banks, which may or may not benefit from
privatisation.
Electronic and mobile technologies, which are improving the infrastructure for financial
transactions in rural areas, need to be extended beyond household needs to meet more
SME requirements.
Non-financial physical infrastructure water supply, roads, power, telecommunications,
schools, health posts, and so on, is usually relatively neglected in rural areas, which
obviously weakens farming at all scales as well as all other rural economic activities,
including financial services. This is a local government responsibility, though judicious
donor support in the form of technical assistance and partial funding can obviously help.
Extension services, and educating farmers about business, are also good candidates for
government budgetary support, though delivery models can vary. Another high priority
for government within non-financial infrastructure is the sponsorship of local,
participative agricultural R&D (research and development).

Combining aggregation, market linkage, and finance


Aggregating smallholder agriculture clearly improves access to markets but the financial
constraint often remains. Risks and transaction costs are still high in relation to expected
returns. Finance along, or linked to, tightly-integrated and hence lower-risk value chains,
may be valuable, but cannot meet the needs for finance of all smallholder farmers, most
of whom are not in any organised group.
Moreover, value-chain finance has so far been mainly concentrated in higher-value
export crops or commodities, rather than in staple food production for local or regional
markets. External finance, provided directly, can also better preserve the independence
and diversification of the primary producers, and encourages the development of local
financial institutions.
The most common form of aggregation is the producer association. Other aggregation
and market-linkage models, such as the hub-outgrower model and various forms of
contract farming, offer an alternative to individual farmers, both those on family plots,
and more commonly those with larger landholdings, that want to remain more
independent. Again, some of these are focused on international markets, but others are
combining local food production and export crops. External finance is sometimes present

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Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
as a component in these arrangements, leveraged in by the reduction in risk brought
about by market linkage.

Concerted and multiple actions required


This paper seeks to show that while the reason for the missing middle is fairly
straightforward, eliminating it requires a multi-track approach to match the complex
pattern of demand, supply, and infrastructure features.
Setting up new institutional arrangements or intermediaries to divert scarce public or
donor capital always adds costs, and does not in itself reduce risk, or increase returns.
The possible benefits of this type of response, often put in the category of learning, or
demonstration of viability, need to be carefully assessed against the danger of
duplication of similar initiatives and the opportunity costs for all players involved of
employing the resources in this way.
Many of the promising initiatives aimed at reducing the missing middle finance gap rely
on combinations of actors, playing to their respective strengths. The common theme is
working with the grain of the private sector to remove frictions of various kinds, thus
improving the balance between risk, cost, and return. In this way, scale should be
achieved. A number of initiatives cited in the paper are reviewed below:
NGOs with a financial focus and a business development culture often have a
crucial role, at least in the early stages, creating linkages and networks among
financial suppliers, women and men producers, buyers, and other service
providers;
multilateral donors can be key sponsors of financial sector reform programmes
working with national governments and central banks. Reforms can focus on
specific institutions such as agricultural development banks, on better regulation,
on improvements to financial infrastructure, or on stimulating competition in
rural finance;
donors and international financial institutions (IFIs) have pump-primed
innovative financing mechanisms, such as warehouse receipts and leasing;
alliances have been struck between commercial banks and non-financial
distribution networks: for example, of irrigation equipment or mobile phone
services;
socially responsible investors of various kinds have been important in Fair Trade
transaction financing, either working directly or in conjunction with banks. There
are a few examples of business development investment in activities closely
linked to primary agriculture;
foundations and socially-oriented banks are offering partial and temporary
guarantees on a commercial basis, sometimes working with other risk mitigation
mechanisms, in order to encourage commercial banks to take the small-scale
agricultural sector seriously as a profitable market segment.
poverty-focused NGOs have explored the possibilities of building capacity in
womens and mens smallholder groups, and other small-scale producer
associations, in remote and difficult locations and then brokering linkages to
formal sources of finance to support livelihoods.
Continuation of these and other efforts will be needed, as well as careful and
independent evaluations of what works and what does not, if progress to solving the
missing middle gap is to be maintained and indeed accelerated.

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1. Introduction
New global forces the economic downturn, a food crisis, and climate change are
driving a renewed interest in ways to improve the productivity of smallholder farmers in
developing and emerging economies. More than two billion women and men work on
smallholder farms and most live on less than two dollars a day. 1 Smallholder farmers can
be efficient producers on a per-hectare basis. 2 However, limited capital for investment;
exposure to risks such as weather; unreliable markets; and market price fluctuations, as
well as imperfect knowledge of sustainable approaches and technologies, mean most
smallholder farmers are not optimising potential returns.
Investment in agriculture is believed to pay off in terms of poverty alleviation; food
security; and national economic development. Studies show that growth generated by
agriculture, if it is appropriate in terms of capital intensity, can be up to four times more
effective in reducing poverty than growth in other sectors. 3 Improving the productivity
of small-scale farming has the most potential to achieve this growth. If this can be done in
a way that is congruent with soil-carbon sequestration, there is also a huge potential for
CO2 abatement. 4
Three-quarters of the worlds 1.4 billion extremely poor people live in rural areas.
Farming, given its labour intensity, creates accessible employment for large numbers of
people of varying skill-levels. 5 Increasing the returns to land raises the value of one of
the few assets of the rural poor as well as improving food security for families. Increasing
the absolute contribution to food supply from small-scale agriculture is also critical for
meeting global food demand. This is projected to rise by 50 per cent by 2030, presenting
new income-earning potential for smallholders and viable investment opportunities for
capital providers. 6
However, this market segment suffers from huge underinvestment. For example, less
than 1 per cent of commercial lending in Africa is going to agriculture. 7 There is an
urgent need to improve the flow of finance, particularly for larger, individually-owned
farms and for enterprises that aggregate the capacity of smallholder farmers, where
productivity gains can be more easily achieved.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the solution was seen as large-scale state-funded programmes,
delivered through government-owned institutions usually agricultural development
banks often accompanied by subsidies to end-users. Marketing boards or their
equivalent providing guaranteed prices, and sometimes extension services, were another
common element. This approach fell out of favour during the 1990s in the international
policy climate of market liberalisation, and is generally agreed 8 to have suffered from
huge inefficiencies, high costs, and frequent failure to provide adequate benefits to small-
scale farmers. Many such structures and accompanying programmes have been
dismantled, sometimes as a result of conditions imposed by IMF (International Monetary
Fund) bail-outs.
So far, however, the private financial services industry has made limited progress in
replacing the old paradigm by responding to the financial needs of small-scale
agriculture and seeking out opportunities to improve existing services; develop new
ones; and generate additional revenue. The gap in the financial landscape known as the
missing middle remains a major challenge. The data is unavailable to quantify it even on
a country level, let alone globally, but there is a consensus that the missing middle is a
substantial and persistent problem.
The term is applied to small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in general, and refers
to the lack of capital appropriate for their risk profile and available in the amounts they
need. The loans or investments sought, typically in the range 5,000 to 500,000 for start-
up or expansion, are generally too small to attract mainstream banks and private equity

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groups and too large to be met by microfinance institutions. Recently there have been
moves by organisations working to tackle the gap to rebrand this market segment to
show it in a more optimistic light: SMEs are now also being referred to as small and
growing businesses or grassroots businesses.
Figure 1: Rural finance gap and the missing middle

Source: Practical Action Publishing. 9

Agricultural SMEs are one segment of the broader SME market and their missing middle
is just one part of the overall rural finance gap. This paper is concerned with
commercially-oriented, small- and medium-scale farming businesses. Some are larger
privately-owned firms employing women and men workers, others group smallholders
in collective production and marketing activities. The aggregation process can move
families working small plots, typically under two hectares, from household subsistence
production to surplus farming for markets. To attract external finance, these businesses
need organisational cohesion and management capacity, especially in financial and
business planning.
The main activity focused on in this paper is the primary production and marketing of
crops and livestock. The financing of SMEs specialising in downstream activities, such as
processing and agro-industry, is not excluded, though the gap for them is less serious
because of their more favourable risk profile. The paper does not specifically cover other
rural enterprises, although their importance in the rural economy is well-understood. 10
Organisationally, enterprises range from informal associations, through traditional co-
operatives, to privately-owned businesses providing employment for primary producers.
There are also hybrid structures that combine the features of member-based co-
operatives and private companies.
Geographically, the paper has no specific regional focus, and draws examples from many
countries. A useful global perspective on agriculture is the tripartite one adopted by the
World Bank. 11 The first category is agriculture-based countries: these have a large share
of GDP (gross domestic product) in agriculture and most of their people in poverty live
in rural areas. It includes most of sub-Saharan Africa. In transforming countries, most
economic growth is in non-agricultural sectors, but poverty remains overwhelmingly
rural. This covers most of Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, as well as parts of
Europe and Central Asia. Finally, urbanised countries: these are mostly in Latin America

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and some parts of Europe and Central Asia, where much poverty is urban and
agriculture may be dynamic but is a small share of total GDP.
It is important for potential lenders and investors to understand the barriers to both
effective demand and supply that constrain the impact and expansion of SME
agricultural finance. Equally, it is important to see how diverse and flexible financing
models coupled with complementary business support services are beginning to address
the capital, risk-management, and cash-flow needs of SME agricultural enterprises. This
paper:
provides a formal analytical explanation of the supply-side phenomenon of the
missing middle;
examines the constraints holding back effective demand for finance from
smallholders;
surveys the sources of supply of finance and the constraints preventing their
reaching the segment;
highlights how financial- and risk-management services from private, public, and
philanthropic sectors are evolving to narrow the gap, providing examples of models
being tested that benefit smallholder farmers;
identifies improvements in the infrastructure supporting the financial sector, which
are improving or could improve the function of agricultural finance markets;
reviews the responsibility and opportunity for the private finance sector given by the
missing middle;
concludes by summarising the main findings and themes of the paper, in particular
the pathways along which the competitiveness and reliability of markets for small-
scale agricultural finance can improve and hence reduce the missing middle.

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Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
2. Why the middle is missing
The observation is widespread that there is, indeed, a missing middle, that is, that loans
(and equity investments) are rarely provided in the size range between where micro-
lending ends and where large-scale corporate lending begins. Moreover, this is true for
urban as well as rural areas, so that it is important to understand the general reasons
before delving into the peculiarities of rural finance. It is also important to recall that
before the expansion of sustainable micro-credit in the 1990s, all lending by formal
financial institutions was largely at the upper end, with those at the lower end being
served by informal finance, if at all.
The next step in probing why the middle is missing is to understand the guiding
principles that have made micro-credit, or at least a part of it, sustainable. The first key
point is that the micro-entrepreneur (like the small-scale subsistence farmer to be
discussed below) must be diversified to deal with risk in order to survive; what is crucial
for a lender is the familys overall cash flow rather than the specific performance of some
micro-enterprise. An important corollary of this is that it is a waste of lender resources
to try to monitor closely the performance of this enterprise or even how borrowed funds
are used because, in any case, money is fungible: that is money lent cannot be traced
directly to money spent on a specific purchase.
The next point is the overriding importance of transaction costs incurred by borrowers
relative to interest rates paid. Specifically, the greater importance of transaction costs
compared to interest costs for small loans for short periods of time is what lies behind the
popularity (success) of micro-credit, despite its high interest rates. The delivery channels
for micro-credit keep transaction costs down for borrowers. Likewise, lenders must keep
their own administrative costs low, in addition to charging high interest rates, in order
to make micro-lending profitable and hence sustainable. Cost, of course, in the form of
legal and administrative requirements, rules out the use of formal collateral for micro-
loans, although co-signers and informal collateral (for example, arrangements to
surrender bicycles, tools, televisions, and other domestic appliances, etc.) are often used
for enforcement if repayment is not forthcoming.
Of course, some lender costs that are relatively significant cannot be avoided: for
example, the loan officer normally has to visit the prospective borrower to work through
the familys overall cash flows since no formal accounting records can be expected.
However, since the place of business and the home are often the same (or at least
nearby), the loan officer can at the same time assess key indicators of character (viewing
living conditions for example, and talking with neighbours and individuals with whom
the prospective borrower has business relationships). Nonetheless, these visits are costly
relative to the size of the loan, so that the first loan is unlikely to be profitable. This
means that client retention rates, with loan sizes increasing, are as important as loan
repayment rates in making micro-lending profitable.
What is it then that makes lending to SMEs so much more problematic? First and
foremost, it is the reduction in risk diversification as the SME becomes more important
than the familys overall cash flow. The lender must now analyse the SME in all its
details (e.g. the ability and character of the management, the prospects for the product,
the position of this SME relative to competitors, etc.) in order to understand the risks
involved. To cover such costs, loans must be significantly larger, reaching a size that
substantially exceeds the absorptive capacity for capital of the SME hence the missing
middle.
Moreover, lenders face a further diversification problem: precisely because they
specialise in understanding thoroughly a narrow range of enterprise types, they tend to

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amass an undiversified loan portfolio and this may be especially applicable to
agriculture and to rural areas in general.
Finally, in contrast to working-capital loans, longer-term financing (perhaps in larger
amounts) is likely to be sought for investments that can allow an SME to grow. To
provide medium- and long-term loans, the lender may need to improve the overall
stability of its deposit liabilities or other funding sources, and go further than necessary
to satisfy the banking regulator, typically being over-conservative on this issue.
Turning to agriculture and to rural lending in general, the foregoing observations apply,
plus a host of other barriers that raise lender costs (for example, long distances and low
population densities, less adequate infrastructure, etc.) plus inevitable limitations on
diversification in rural areas. In this connection, the reasons for the well-known failure of
micro-lending to penetrate rural areas are instructive.
One reason for the relative absence of micro-lending in rural areas is that lenders do not
recognise that many rural households are often just as diversified as their urban
counterparts. They are hence equally suitable for traditional micro-lending techniques,
including monthly or even weekly repayments, essential for the lender to retain adequate
contact with the borrower. Equally, however, those households that depend heavily on
crop cycles need larger, longer-term, and better-structured finance, which most micro-
lenders are ill-equipped to provide. There are exceptions: one product designed by
Opportunity International and implemented by its microfinance institution (MFI) partner
in Macedonia 12 supported crop/agricultural lending but had a minimum monthly
repayment notional but habit forming with the remainder payable at point of
crop/livestock sale.
The problem of higher risk for specialised agricultural activities becomes greater when
finance is required not just to cover buyer credit or production cycles but for investment
projects or for enterprise development in general. Here the exposure is longer, and the
risks are much harder to assess, as outcomes depend more on the character and capacity
of management, and the loan is not based on specific transactions. These considerations
apply to SMEs in general, but pose special difficulties for co-operative forms of producer
association, where ownership and control are dispersed, and there is no mechanism for
an external investor to take an equity stake. 13 This is because lenders want to compensate
for their higher risk by requiring the owners of the enterprise, or external investors, to
inject more cash into the business as equity, or to guarantee the loans personally.
External investment, other than informal from family and friends, is available only for a
tiny proportion of SMEs in all economies. The reasons for this are threefold. First, it is
appropriate only for the minority of SMEs that are both growth-oriented and have the
business model and management to give a reasonable chance of achieving such growth.
Second, professional investors taking significant shares in enterprises have to recover the
transaction costs of making and monitoring their investments and of absorbing the losses
from the enterprises in their portfolio that fail. These costs are largely independent of the
size of the investment, so that having a smaller number of bigger investments in larger
size firms is nearly always the preferred strategy. Third, there have to be one or more
reliable exit routes so that investors can sell their stakes to realise the profits and recycle
their capital. As will be seen later in the paper, there are some novel approaches to the
problem of small-ticket equity being tried, though so far with little or no impact on
agriculture.

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Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
3. The lack of effective demand
Demand for finance would be higher if more small-scale farmers were able to optimise
their production activities and invest accordingly. Individual farmers, without access to
methods of reducing or transferring their risk, confront the full range of agriculture-
related risks drought, heavy and/or untimely rainfall, variable soil conditions, pest and
disease outbreaks, and volatility in market prices. In the face of these risks, many of those
working small, family plots do not specialise in a higher-value cash crop but sensibly
take a diversified and subsistence approach to their livelihood (see Box 1) to try to meet
the basic consumption needs of their households, and then market any surplus, if they
achieve one. Many smallholder farmers remain net buyers of food. 14

Box 1. The risk trap for subsistence smallholders


The cash-flow and risk-management needs of agriculture-dependent households prevent
most smallholders from allocating capital sources towards more specialised and profitable
production activities for market. Most rural households operate tiny land holdings (less than
two hectares) for a range of subsistence production activities and they diversify their income
sources across farm and non-farm economic activities. They tend to favour low-risk, low-
return crops that do not require significant investment in inputs but are more robust even in
unfavourable weather and soil conditions. 15 For example, one hectare of maize, which
requires several applications of (costly) fertiliser, can yield three times as much as one
hectare of millet or sorghum. A study in Kenya found that less than one-half of farmers who
intended to invest in fertiliser actually did so even though fertiliser increases yield returns up
to 36 per cent over several months. 16 For cash constrained households, the security of a
sub-optimal supply of food is frequently the only rational option. This subsistence approach
to farming minimises demand for external capital and its potential returns.
Source: Oxfam GB

A second set of smallholders wealthier individual farmers with larger landholdings (up
to 10 hectares) and employing significant levels of hired labour have potential capital
requirements in the lower tiers of the missing middle. These larger individual farm
households are in a better position to borrow for specialised agricultural activity, but one
constraint on their effective demand for credit is the lack of complementary financial
services, such as savings and insurance, more appropriate for coping with some kinds of
risk (see Figure 2 and Box 2). With a range of basic financial services and given access to
market outlets these farmers have the potential to manage the risks of specialisation and
build their production capabilities to produce at a sufficient scale to be attractive small
enterprises.

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Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
Figure 2: Blend of financial services for risk management

INCREASING
FREQUENCY OF
LOSSES
Frequent, Less Severe Risk;
Independent Losses
Savings

Less Frequent, Moderate Risk;


Credit

Correlated Losses (drought, flood)


Insurance
INCREASING SEVERITY OF
LOSSES

Source: Oxfam GB

Box 2. Credit alone is insufficient


Smallholder households, with small and large landholdings, are likely to require a blend of
complementary financial services to gain the economic stability and confidence to maximise
the allocation of self-mobilised capital or borrowed sources, which carry additional cost and
risk. The examples below illustrate how different financial services credit, savings, and
insurance can assist smallholders in managing foreseen and unforeseen risks of varying
severity and frequency.
Short-term credit: cash or in-kind sources of short-term credit for seasonal inputs, such as
seeds, fertiliser, and hired labour, can help smallholders expand or diversify their production
activities.
Long-term credit: longer-term credit (over 12 months) facilitates procurement of larger
purchases, such as equipment, which can significantly improve productivity. Preparing land
by hand requires farmers to cover an area twice as many times as it takes with a simple
plough, and hand-sowing results in an inferior quality of planting. Leasing, discussed later in
this report, is an alternative arrangement for farmers to gain the right to use, and potentially
own, equipment in return for a series of payments.
Savings and insurance: credit is not the only constraint. Illness and unfavourable weather are
often matters of the greatest concern that affect the productivity of agricultural-dependent
households and their willingness to invest scarce resources into more profitable agricultural
activities. Having savings can prevent smallholders from selling off productive assets or
making lower cost, lower-return investment decisions to cover expenses associated with less
severe, independent risks, such as illness. Having insurance changes the incentives for
farmers to better optimise investment decisions and protect them from losses in the face of
potentially catastrophic events, such as drought or flooding.
Source: Oxfam GB

In considering effective demand, what is required is judicious rather than maximal use of
external capital. Heavy use of inputs such as fertiliser, pesticides, and herbicides as well
as expensive seed varieties that require external capital is not the only route to improving

14 The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
productivity. While providing quick gains, these methods may be unsustainable in the
longer run. Knowledge-based inputs, such as practices to improve soil fertility; rainwater
retention; and integrated pest management, within a LEIT (low external inputs
technology) approach, can be an effective complement, economising on inorganic
fertiliser, in raising productivity. This is especially so in more remote areas where
farmers are dispersed, and land quality is poor. Such methods cause minimal harm to the
environment; promote collective action among farmers; and also reduce costs. 17
Importantly, such methods also contribute to mitigating climate change through carbon
sequestration, for which there is huge potential in the agriculture of developing
countries:maintaining 18 high levels of the carbon stocks in the soil and with adaptation
to new climate circumstances. 19 The methods can also have a positive impact on other
rural activities and employment. When Indonesia, for example, banned the most harmful
pesticides; removed costly subsidies on the others in use by rice farmers; and introduced
integrated pest management instead, jobs of pesticide salesman fell dramatically and jobs
for local extension workers rose in field-schools for farmers. 20 The efficient delivery,
however, of the extension and education programmes necessary for the successful
application of LEIT agriculture requires a high-quality public investment programme,
itself another challenge.

Limited penetration of smallholder associations


The bringing together of individual farmers and their production capacity via producer
associations, co-operatives, and other forms of collective enterprise greatly improves
their access to methods of diversifying and transferring their risk. It also leads to
economies of scale in market transactions and greater bargaining power to form more
reliable and profitable relationships with market players.
Organised associations of farmers facilitate access to input and output markets as well as
to knowledge channels. When aggregated, farmers are much more willing to invest in
productivity-enhancing practices and to undertake activities with higher profit margins.
They move from diversified subsistence farming to specialised surplus production
activities, and from being net buyers to net suppliers of food. All these changes increase
the demand for external finance.
Of the 800 million smallholders in developing countries, however, it is estimated that
only a third (250 million) belongs to producer organisations. 21 Globalisation of value
chains 22 and the expansion of supermarkets in developing countries are two factors
increasing the need for farmer organisations to support individual smallholders by
providing the necessary market linkages, economies of scale, and quality control.
Despite this growing pressure, many smallholders are still simply operating as
individual farmers, where risk traps are more severe.

Women farmers: excluded


Within the missing middle, women constitute the largest missed potential. The role of
women in agriculture and the added economic value they can bring is underestimated.
Women produce one-half of the worlds food. 23 One in five farms is headed by a woman,
and women form well over half the agricultural workforce. 24 Yet, globally, women
receive only 10 per cent of agricultural credit and less than 5 per cent of agricultural
extension services worldwide. 25, 26
Common barriers such as limited mobility; absence of land rights; 27 poor access to
education and hence literacy; and restricted social networks inhibit womens
engagement with agricultural organisations that can improve their access to the markets,
capital, and the technology needed to move into higher-value, market-oriented

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Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
production. Women are often simply excluded from membership and management of
rural co-operatives. World Bank studies found that giving women farmers in Kenya the
same inputs and education as men could increase yields by more than 20 per cent. In
Zambia, if women had the same overall degree of capital investment in agricultural
inputs, including land, as their men counterparts, output in Zambia could increase by up
to 15 per cent. A 1995 study in Burkina Faso, where men controlled fertiliser use within
the household, showed that output could be increased by between 10 and 20 percent by
reallocating actually used factors of production between plots controlled by men and
women in the same household 28 . Additionally, a survey across 20 countries found that
womens engagement in community organisations led to higher levels of collaboration
and solidarity, and improved resolution of conflicts. There is also some evidence that
womens agricultural organisations can outperform mens organisations. 29

Lack of collateral and collateral substitutes


Even men farmers, both individuals and grouped into producer associations, frequently
lack the collateral traditionally required by banks for larger and longer-term loans. This
is exacerbated where the legal and administrative framework does not support collateral
contracts effectively through registration and court procedures. The result is that
required collateral ratios are much higher than they would be otherwise.
Collateral substitutes acceptable to banks, in the form of third-party sureties or partial
guarantees from external funds, are sometimes available. However, government funded
guarantee funds and agricultural insurance corporations designed to support
agricultural lending and common in the 1970s and 1980s had on the whole a poor
performance record, weakening the trust that banks have in this type of instrument. 30

Weak organisational capacity


Many existing agricultural SMEs cannot meet minimum requirements of financial service
providers. Geographical isolation for some agricultural enterprises can put bankers or
investors completely out of reach for effective communication. In some regions, producer
associations have been recently created as a response to the withdrawal of the old
paradigm of state-provided agricultural finance and marketing support. 31 These begin
with social and sometimes political functions. Transforming them into enterprises
requires a major cultural adjustment, and sometimes setting up a separate organisation
may be preferable.
Before being attractive to external capital providers, agricultural enterprises need to
prove their capacity as borrowers or investees. Basic business skills such as strategic
planning, record-keeping for financial reporting and analysis, human resource
management, and marketing can be acutely lacking in smaller rural enterprises that
cannot attract trained staff. This problem is exacerbated where government and donor
support for extension services and SME development infrastructure has been reduced.
Newly formed enterprises or those poised for expansion can require significant upfront
investment to finance costly inputs and equipment, yet the range of possible outcomes
presents a high degree of unpredictability, making financial planning and hence a
convincing approach to an external provider difficult.
Those responsible for managing the enterprise also need to demonstrate that they can
plan for and respond in time to contingencies, for example, unexpected weather patterns
or price fluctuations that can negatively or positively affect the financial position of the
business.
Even among high-potential enterprises there can simply be unfamiliarity with the
spectrum of possible financial mechanisms and the potential providers who would best

16 The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
meet their financing needs. Owners or finance managers may lack the confidence to
assess the trade-offs of working with different financial mechanisms.

4. Capital suppliers and their constraints


On the supply side, the financial sector has not found the right delivery models or risk-
reward relationships to supply enough capital to meet the diverse needs of agricultural
SMEs. The financing needs of this market appear tiny (though this may not be true in
aggregate) compared to the clear opportunities presented by large-scale agricultural
enterprises and non-agricultural businesses. This overriding perception deters new
entrants from being attracted to the sector and leaves little competition among existing
ones. 32
Another major constraint is that agriculture is generally perceived to be a low-margin
business compared with other economic activities, because of poor returns in
unstructured markets on top of covariant (affecting many activities simultaneously)
agriculture-related risks. Burdensome regulatory policies; poor infrastructure; limited
access to and use of technologies that can enhance basic productivity; and weak market
linkages between small-scale production, processing, and marketing businesses further
deter the supply of private sector capital. This perception is changing, however, in the
new conditions of higher food prices, and with new investors entering the market.
Where there is active financing, it has tended to be focused on last-mile activities, such
as processing, marketing, and distribution. First-mile transactions those oriented
towards increasing the quality and quantity of smallholders produce bear a greater
level of uncertainty so that capital flows are most limited for seasonal crop finance.
Where finance is available it is usually limited to short-term working capital, such as pre-
financing for inputs from crop buyers or trader credit from seed or fertiliser suppliers.
Longer-term sources of capital, such as loans of several years duration, are even more
difficult to come by given the lack of visibility and degree of unpredictability in cash
flows and asset recovery in future years.

Trade credit
Traditionally, marketing linkages what is now called the value chain have been the
dominant, albeit insufficient, source of working capital for smallholders. Credit can be in
cash or in-kind, whereby repayment is deducted when production is delivered to traders.
Local suppliers and buyers, however, rarely have sufficiently deep pockets to meet even
the short-term capital requirements of more substantial agricultural SMEs. Also fewer
would have an interest in providing credit for investment in expansion, given the larger
amounts needed, higher risks, and longer exposures.
The connection between marketing linkages and agricultural finance has been studied for
many years. A seminal study from the 1970s analysed linkages between marketing and
credit in Colombia and various Central American countries. 33 Marketing agents (sellers
of inputs and buyers of outputs) tended to be the main providers of finance for
agricultural producers, especially small-scale ones, rather than banks. The main reason
was, of course, the intimate knowledge that buyers of output in particular have about the
cash flow and reliability of producers, especially compared with what bankers know. The
main barriers to more widespread lending by marketing agents were found to be the
prejudices against middlemen nicknamed coyotes in the development community.
Their services were seen to be unproductive or at worst exploitative from local
monopolies, so that they were typically excluded from the credit lines for agriculture that
were so prevalent at that time. Such exclusion from formal finance not only reduced their

17 The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
ability to on-lend but also tended to enhance their monopoly powers by reducing
competition.
Over the last twenty years, the traditional, small-scale middlemen have been
supplemented in many areas by more powerful actors working along integrated value
chains. Increasingly, the buyer at the top of the chain is a major food manufacturer or a
regional, national or international supermarket operation. The best chains offer a lot
more than credit to producer associations and other SMEs: capacity-building; supplies of
suitable inputs; access to market nodes (safe storage and transport hubs) or collection
points; appropriate technologies; business relationships and strategies for the mitigation
of risk. However, the extent to which the new kind of value chain is improving the flow
of credit to agricultural SMEs at an acceptable level of risk to producers is still a matter of
debate. 34 Also, to be included in the chain, the smallholder group must conform closely
to the requirements of the buyer. Many producer organisations, especially those in more
remote areas, want to retain more flexibility in their activities. Finally, there is a
continuing danger of confusion over charges, and worse of exploitation, if a single
counterparty, i.e. business partner, is solely responsible for the supply of inputs, credit
and crop sales.

Commercial banks
The reluctance of private-sector commercial banks to lend to the agricultural sector,
beyond a few large-scale agribusinesses, is well known and driven by the perception that
agricultural enterprises are not only higher risk and less well-managed than SMEs in
other sectors but also fail to offer the prospect of a compensating higher return. Banks
generally have had no incentive to incur the fixed and recurrent costs required to build
an understanding of the risks of SME agriculture, such as weather and price variability,
and then to service large numbers of geographically dispersed enterprises requiring
small loans. Most of them simply limit their engagement in rural areas or impose heavy
collateral requirements even in production sectors with reliable markets, such as
commodities. Even where collateral is available, the cost to the bank of perfecting it
registering it to make it legally useable is often high in relation to the return on an SME
loan. In some cases, banks require additional security such as government guarantees,
and some of these have proved unreliable in the past, making banks in those countries
wary.
Handling the funding of longer-term loans required for investment projects by
agricultural SMEs can also be more problematic for smaller banks with less ability to
raise funds through issuing bonds or other capital market instruments, or from central
bank refinancing. There is a failure of bankers, and even regulators, to recognise the
overall stability of large pools of small sight deposits 35 , despite their being withdrawable
on demand. As a result, there is exaggerated concern over any dependence of funding on
a small number of large-scale time deposits that are indeed vulnerable to flight when
competing interest rates rise.
Banks also have fears, often grounded in historical experience, of political interference in
the finance market for agriculture, a sector that typically dominates the economy and
population. Such involvement can affect market dynamics, loan recovery, and the
reclaiming of assets. Generalised loan pardoning by state-owned banks has occurred in
several countries, India and Honduras, for example, 36 reducing the willingness to repay
of a new generation of borrowers.
Compared to larger international and regional banks, local independent banks that are
closer to the ground tend to be more willing and able to be flexible and innovative in
responding to the needs of the agricultural sector. 37 But their advantages in local
knowledge are offset by their vulnerability to systemic default from covariant risks
climate, pests, and so on, faced by most or all the farmers in a small area, and to the

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Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
associated liquidity shortage brought about non-performing loans, i.e. those where
repayments are interrupted or cease altogether. These considerations also apply to the
few larger MFIs that have the capacity to lend in the sizes and for the terms needed by
agricultural SMEs.
Less locally based banks, with national or regional coverage, can diversify across
geography and activity and provide pooled liquidity. The problem for them is effective
delegation, so that loan applications are not routinely sent up to head office. What is
needed are effective systems of local incentives for lending officers, backed up by good
internal financial and audit controls.
Overall, domestic bank lending remains at only a fraction of its potential in many
countries. A survey across six countries, generating 1938 per cent of their GDP from
agriculture, showed that local banks on average allocate less than 8 per cent of their
lending to the sector. 38

Agricultural development banks


State owned agricultural development banks had a very poor track record in the 1970s
and 1980s. This followed the high hopes for them as a key channel for the development
effort launched in the 1950s and 1960s backed by the Western policy community and
relying on subsidised finance. Many have failed or been closed down.
Weak banking practice exacerbated by bad governance, associated with political
intrusion and corruption, was the key reason for most failures. However, in a recent
GTZ 39 study led by Hans Dieter Seibel 40 (on which this section draws) at least 75 state-
owned agricultural development banks were identified as still functioning in 2006. Some
have survived difficult times through exceptional governance circumstances for
example the Land Bank of the Philippines where others in the same country failed. 41
The important question for this paper is whether there is a useful role to be played in the
provision of growth finance for medium-scale agriculture by those agricultural
development banks that have not only survived but have been, or are in the process of
being, successfully reformed.
The aim of reform is to transform these banks into self-reliant sustainable financial
intermediaries that are active and responsible participants in rural financial markets.
One reason for attempting reform is that the outreach of agricultural development banks
can be substantially better than the nearest alternative because they have large rural
branch networks with trained staff, even if their quality of service needs much
improvement. Private financial institutions have often been driven out from rural areas
by the subsidised interest rates and weak loan recovery policies of agricultural
development banks, so that the latter offer the only remaining financial infrastructure.
Another is that ignoring a problematic loss-making agricultural development bank
implies substantial on-going fiscal costs for the country, as most international donors are
no longer willing to support such unreformed institutions. As liquidation 42 of these
agricultural development banks normally means the loss of this valuable infrastructure,
reform, which may include privatisation, becomes an option that should be carefully
considered.
For sustainability, the elements of reform include an end to subsidised credit; a strong
savings offering to mobilise deposits; a diversified portfolio of demand-oriented financial
products, timely repayment encouraged by incentives and the offer of repeat loans;
transforming branches into profit centres and offering performance incentives to staff; as
well as increasing outreach especially to small farmers, female and male.
Reform is sometimes compatible with continued state ownership, as in the case of Bank
Rakyat Indonesia, BNDA Mali, and others in Syria, Iran, and Jordan, but also with partial

19 The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
or complete privatisation, for example Banque Nationale Agricole, Tunisia, several banks
in Latin America, and Mongolias Agricultural Bank. Regional associations of
agricultural credit providers have been set up, covering Africa, Asia, Latin America, and
the Middle East/North Africa. 43 These are channels for efforts at reform, with a strong
focus on governance, supported by substantial external technical assistance from
multilateral and bilateral donors. The process of reform is slow, however, taking several
years.
Flagship banks in each region are showing the way forward and some others are
following, but the availability of local branches in a reformed bank will not be enough if
the bank branches do not have the tools to manage the credit risks while keeping
transaction costs down. Risks include those that are weather- and price-related, as well as
those associated with matching asset and liability maturities while building a portfolio of
loans in the missing middle market segment. The cost of credit is another question.

Public-sector credit
A principal role for agricultural development banks in earlier decades was to channel
subsidised credit to farmers. While this approach to agricultural finance has been largely,
though not entirely, abandoned, recent discussion on the failure so far of the private
sector to do much to replace it has reopened the debate on whether it should be
reintroduced in some form. 44 What contribution can public-sector credit, which is almost
always accompanied by elements of subsidy, overt or hidden, make to filling in the
missing middle?
The first obvious drawback to subsidised credit is that it is limited in scale, relying as it
must on government budget allocations, sometimes backed up by external donor capital,
both subject to fierce competition from other priorities. Attempts to target the credit to
those most in need, such as small-scale farmers and their organisations, to maximise its
effect, have run into another problem: rent-seeking. Rent-seeking is appropriation of the
programme resources by others interested just in obtaining the cheap credit, not in using
it for the intended purpose and also thinking it need not be repaid, given the source.
Larger and more sophisticated borrowers have the resources to circumvent in various
ways the rules that govern the intended allocation of the cheap credit line, such as
making multiple applications to stay below the ceiling for individual loans. Officials may
collude for gain or give in to pressure. The efforts to control such rent-seeking, by
managing the credit-line more carefully, raise transaction costs for all borrowers as
application procedures become more complex and slower. It is nearly always the smaller
borrowers who give up the struggle first. 45
Government-owned and managed credit distribution systems have a poor record on
efficiency and cost control. If new privileged institutions are set up to distribute a fresh
wave of internationally-supported agricultural credit lines at favourable rates, they will
still face the fundamental problems of keeping transaction costs down without the
discipline of competition. The high transaction costs associated with restricting credit to
particular beneficiaries can also bear down on commercial distributors of subsidised
credit, if governments excessively restrict their interest margins, further reducing their
incentives to push the credit to its intended targets.
Finally, the partial availability of low-interest finance, administratively restricted to
certain activities or sub-sectors, introduces unhelpful distortions into the market place,
and can make capital allocation sub-optimal, by diverting resources away from other
more profitable sectors, thus reducing its overall return.
New public-sector credit lines are becoming available as part of the response to climate
change. For example the Clean Development Mechanism under the UN Framework
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is designed to channel funding from public

20 The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
sources, as well as from private and voluntary ones or in combination with them, to
projects that reduce carbon emissions in developing countries. It could be a new source
of finance for certain kinds of investment in smallholder agriculture, but the cumbersome
and inflexible distribution methodology, including the requirement to demonstrate
additionality, has taken years to develop and has already erected a hurdle of large
transaction costs. So far, the agriculture category contains only large-scale livestock
projects mostly involving the treatment of animal manure. The new mechanism designed
to reduce emissions from forestry activities, REDD, 46 included in the Copenhagen
negotiations, also has potential for smallholder investment where forests are next to
farming land, but is likely to run into exactly the same distribution problems.
One approach to reducing transaction costs for disadvantaged producers, especially
women, who are trying to get access to various kinds of subsidised finance, is for non-
governmental organisations (NGOs) to facilitate linkages between finance providers and
borrower associations emerging from the community, temporarily absorbing part of the
transaction cost. Oxfam GB has been doing this successfully on a small scale in Sri Lanka.
Of course NGO resources are also donor-constrained, so sustainability is addressed
through building borrower financial management capacity. Oxfam expects to be able to
withdraw once relations have been established and confidence built up. See Box 3.

Box 3. Brokering access to finance


In Sri Lanka, Oxfam GB has been facilitating linkages between producer organisations and a
variety of banks and other financial institutions distributing government- or donor-subsidised
credit.
Building the capacity of organisations such as womens rural development societies active
in market gardening, livestock breeders co-operative societies, and paddy farmer societies,
including help with loan applications has extended to establishing stakeholder steering
committees for these organisations. Banks and agricultural companies, as well as local
government extension services, are represented on these committees. Confidence building,
including Oxfam meeting senior bank staff to explain the sector and the management
capabilities of potential borrowers, has enabled new client groups to apply successfully for
loans and collateral to be reduced or waived. There is some evidence of take-off and
expansion following good repayment experience; of new banks entering these segments;
and of the technique being applied to funding lines seeking a rate of return closer to
commercial norms. Oxfam has not itself provided any finance or guarantees.
Source: Oxfam GB

Rather than applying the subsidies to credit, governments may be better advised to
subsidise inputs such as fertiliser and seeds, as this avoids rent-seeking; has lower
transaction costs; and creates fewer distortions. It is important of course that the bulk of
subsidy is passed onto the farmers rather than being retained by the suppliers. The recent
programme in Malawi, for example, appears to be showing signs of success and may be
self-funding. 47
Publicly-funded agricultural credit programmes delivered through state-owned channels
or via reluctant commercial institutions have been frequently problematic. Governments
and donors can invest more safely, productively, and with high financial returns 48 in
improving the physical infrastructure in rural areas. Many components of this kind of
investment are not narrowly related to finance, but rather to overcoming the general
discrimination against rural areas that is typically found lack of roads, power,
communications, schools, health facilities, and so on. In the context of climate change,
investment in water infrastructure, both supply and conservation of sources, and in
weather data systems for forecasting and modelling should be moving up in priority.
Achieving such improvements will certainly benefit all farmers.
How public investment can also be productive through improving financial
infrastructure is covered in a later section.

21 The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
Another infrastructure priority is support for agricultural research and development
(R&D) to be carried out in local universities and institutions and with the participation of
farmers, women, and men. Appropriate solutions aligned with social, cultural, and
environmental needs, as well as being economically promising, are much more likely to
emerge from this approach than from relying exclusively on high-tech approaches driven
by Western science and corporate interests. However local research also needs to take
account of the latest scientific information from wherever this comes.
Not all subsidies are inefficient of course. But in the finance sector, as in others, they
should be carefully targeted and hopefully be temporary by being based on careful
problem identification rather than just throwing money at small farmers in poor areas.

Rural financial co-operatives 49


Being private, member-owned, and locally based rural financial co-operatives have the
advantage of local knowledge but suffer from two constraints: lack of long-term funding
to support investment lending, and a poorly-diversified customer base. More focused on
households than on SMEs, and traditionally emphasising savings services as much as
credit, financial co-ops are widespread in the developing world and have substantial
outreach in some countries. In Burkina Faso, Brazil, Kenya, and Sri Lanka, for example,
co-op networks serve 20 per cent or more of households. There are, however, as with
agricultural development banks, serious problems of weak governance and some
unsustainable financial models. Poor regulatory and supervisory frameworks often
exacerbate this situation.
Financial co-ops are also vulnerable to liquidity shortages, or worse insolvency, when
exposed to systemic agricultural risks. Providing short-term liquidity support requires a
well-managed centralised umbrella or apex institution with sufficient expertise to
exercise the right degree of toughness in these situations.
To encourage entry into SME lending and at longer term, it is tempting for donors to
offer credit lines to co-ops for the expansion of their lending to SMEs. However, the
danger is that the institutional stability of co-ops will be disturbed by such interventions,
and that their commitment to mobilise local deposits by offering attractive savings
products will be undermined. The contribution of financial co-ops to solving the missing
middle will therefore have to be paced according to their evolution and strengthening. 50
Apex institutions of networks, or partnerships with like-minded banks, such as the
strongly performing Co-operative Bank in Kenya, may be a better route to the handling
of external long-term funds, forming pools from which local co-ops can draw.

Socially responsible investment


Many new socially responsible investment (SRI) funds focused on SMEs in developing
countries have been raised in the last five years. Capital managed by such funds has
quadrupled to $4bn for those funds prepared to invest in amounts of less than $2m. On
the other hand, many management teams are new; track records and performance data
are scarce; and the volume of deals exited is still small so that the investment category of
developing country SMEs is a long way from being established as a recognised asset
class for institutional investors. Of the 150 funds, more than half are managing less than
$50m. 51 To date, most start-up capital is sourced from foundations, development finance
institutions, and private individuals. Pension funds, insurance companies, and other
capital market participants are just beginning to be tapped by funds with the strongest
track records. The cost of capital for each fund reflects the blend of its sources and their
differing expectations of return.

22 The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
In relation to the missing middle, the classic problem that transaction costs and fund
economics largely preclude small deals applies to these funds. With a small
management team, usually highly paid professionals, and a fund of (say) $30m to
disburse, it makes no sense 52 to make and closely supervise initial investments
substantially less than $1m, even assuming participation in subsequent larger financing
rounds for some companies. Also most investment vehicles are US or European-based,
meaning that their transaction costs are much higher still, unless they can delegate cost-
effectively to an active and competent local presence to facilitate deal-sourcing, due
diligence, and post-investment support. There are additional problems to overcome in
countries where external investment is rare; legal protection for investors is weak; and
exit options are limited.
Furthermore, few investment funds are explicitly focused on agriculture. The bulk of
financing is in commercial business models with high potential for rapid expansion.
Some funds do include agricultural enterprises in their overall portfolio mix, but place
low limits on their exposure to the sector. More common in the agriculture sector are
socially-focused institutions, with low expectations of return for their investors, who are
lending (rather than investing) directly to producer groups in developing countries.
Some 20 of these have been identified with estimated funds of $250300m. 53 To mitigate
risk such funds rely heavily on contract-based, short-term lending models 54 and
geographical diversification. Borrowers and their customers are commonly engaged in
large, well-developed internationally traded sectors, with lower risks, such as coffee or
Fair Trade certified goods. These producer groups are recognised as relatively well-
managed enterprises, having already passed significant certification hurdles. They also
tend to benefit from favourable prices and access to buyer networks and training.

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Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
5. The evolution of financial and risk
management services
The financing gap for agricultural SMEs is far from being closed, but there are some
promising initiatives, some only at the pilot stage, others quite well established. These
include the application of financial tools in innovative ways to satisfy the risk and cost-
management requirements of suppliers and users of capital.
Also important are improvements in financial infrastructure, which benefit all parties in
the market. These directly affect the quality of financial services and especially their
availability in rural areas. They include reducing the costs and widening the forms of
collateralisation; expanding the outreach of credit bureaux; and improving
communications through mobile phones, etc. These are covered in a Section 6.
Many of the developments are being realised through the combined efforts of public,
philanthropic, and private-sector agencies. Below are some examples illustrating how
fundamental barriers in agricultural finance are being tackled within different
institutional settings using a variety of delivery mechanisms. The evolution of efforts has
brought about mixed success and highlights a number of the challenges still to be faced.

Bringing external capital into value chains


Well-structured value chains with close relationships among value-chain actors offer
producer organisations more secure outlets for surplus production and increase
smallholders willingness to invest in practices that enhance productivity and in higher-
margin activities. Payment for goods along the value chain creates opportunities to
extend credit from external sources. 55
In Croatia, for example, 56 the supermarket chain Konzum established preferred-supplier
programmes to procure strawberries. It encourages suppliers to use irrigation and
greenhouses to extend the strawberry season and improve the quality of produce. Such
investments require significant capital, which many farmers did not have, nor did they
possess enough collateral to secure bank loans. So Konzum negotiated with the local
banks to persuade them to lend, using the farmers contracts with the supermarket as a
collateral substitute.
Over the last 10 years, Root Capital, a non-profit social investment fund, has provided
$120m in working capital and investment loans, ranging from $25,000 to $1m, to more
than 200 SME co-operatives and companies across Latin America, Africa, and Asia
engaged in sustainable agriculture, mainly coffee and handicrafts. It lends using a
factoring approach i.e. making partial advances against purchasing agreements with
more than 75 international buyers, such as Starbucks and Whole Foods. Borrowers, who
also receive training in financial management, are advanced up to 60 per cent of the
purchase contract value. On receiving the goods, the buyer pays Root Capital, who
deduct the principal and interest before the balance is paid to the producer group.
Interest rates on loans range from 1015 per cent. The repayment rate from borrowers has
been 99 per cent. 57 85 per cent of lending is short-term working capital. For longer-term
loans, collateral is taken, usually 1.3 to 1.5 times loan value, as compared with a typical
commercial bank requirement of two times.
Root Capital currently covers one-half of its operating costs, tapping into low interest
debt with rates below 4 per cent. Its investors include foundations; corporations looking
for supply-chain stability such as Starbucks; and social investment vehicles. Grants and
donations currently cover the shortfall, but it expects to break even once its rate of

24 The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
lending triples something it is hoping to achieve through its recent fundraising. It also
works with local commercial banks using loan guarantees from the Development Credit
Authority (DCA) programme of the US Agency for International Development (USAID)
when possible. It would like commercial banks to take over its established clients, so that
it can move into more marginal areas.
PepsiCo now sources 60 per cent of its global requirement for potatoes from 15,000
farmers in India, and this large-scale programme, based on annually renewed contracts,
and developed over 15 years, is still expanding. 58 It uses an informal group system,
where 2050 farmers in a locality are linked to it through a respected lead farmer. The
lead farmer facilitates communication, backed up by extension services including soil
and crop experts and weather forecasts, and local storage facilities. Because of the
strength of the guaranteed buy-back arrangement, which has price-premium incentives
for measured crop quality, State Bank of India 60 per cent government owned is
making finance available at a low 7 per cent interest to cover the specialised inputs
required, all of which PepsiCo supplies. Another scheme involving the same two
partners is providing equipment finance for seaweed cultivation by selfhelp groups in
Tamil Nadu. 59
In Kenya, PRIDE Africa, an NGO focused on rural finance, set up a commercially-
oriented transaction broker, DrumNet in 2002. 60 It offers supply-chain management
services for mainly high-value food crops for export. It is an information and risk-
management hub at the centre of a network that contractually links groups of
smallholder farmers, commercial banks, large-scale buyers of farm products, produce
transporters, field agents, and suppliers of farm inputs. Farmer groups need to pool
sufficient savings in order to co-guarantee credits and prepay credit insurance, but then
DrumNet will co-guarantee repayments to commercial banks. DrumNet also guarantees
payment by farmer groups to stockists of inputs, when the group uses its transaction
card. It documents the credit histories of farmer groups, and requires verification by
cellphone calls. DrumNet co-ordinates produce aggregation, quality control, transport,
and marketing services. Banks and buyers have a single account with DrumNet, which
uses its proprietary software platform to calculate and make net payments due to people
in the network, allowing for financing costs. It charges 10 per cent on gross proceeds plus
a fee from participating banks.
Precisely where along the value chain external finance should be provided is not always
obvious. It is tempting to choose the larger and more sophisticated actors further away
from the primary growers, but this may not result in the costs and benefits of the
financing being fairly distributed or the maximum return being generated from the
investment.

Expanding inventory credit


External finance can also be secured on stocks, though these need to be secure and
accurately certified. Over the last decade, schemes based on warehouse receipts have
received donor support in both technical assistance and finance. Producers deposit their
goods in certified storage facilities in exchange for a receipt documenting the value,
which can then be leveraged for a loan to finance inputs or investment needs. Access to
storage also allows for the delayed sale of goods until prices are more favourable.
However, sophisticated warehouse facilities carry substantial fixed operating costs that
have to be recovered in user fees if they are to be sustainable. In Mali, for example,
evaluation of a USAID-sponsored pilot found that individual farmers who were not able
to produce sufficient level of surplus, lost money. 61 Less formal schemes may be more
cost-effective to support individual smallholders but could lack sufficient legitimacy and
transparency in front of external capital providers, and thus remain an instance of the
missing middle.

25 The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
New credit distribution channels for commercial banks
The development of new credit distribution channels for commercial banks parallels
what has been happening in the personal finance market, where banks have made
alliances or agency agreements with a variety of retailer networks to reach new market
segments. In India, for example, ICICI Bank, already active in expanding its rural
outreach, collaborated with a non-profit company, IDEI the Indian affiliate of
International Development Enterprises, California that develops solutions for improved
irrigation and water supply for farmers, sources them from local manufacturers, and
markets through a network of distributors. Earlier, IDEI had received support from
Acumen Fund, a philanthropic mixed-source fund seeking below-market rates of return
and recycling of them into further investment. Investment in appropriate irrigation
technology, for example treadle pumps and small-scale drip-feed systems, is one of the
surest ways to increase farm productivity and raise smallholder incomes.
ICICI Bank appointed five irrigation equipment distributors as credit franchisees in a
pilot programme in February 2007. In this way, it was able to lower the transaction costs
and hence the price of credit to farmers wanting to improve their irrigation. The
franchisees had to share risk by putting up equity (minimum $11,000), which provided a
first-loss guarantee, and upon which they could then draw up to 10 times that amount
from ICICI funds to make loans to farmers. Farmer loans, at a minimum of $111, could be
for up to two years, and at rates from 1114 per cent, depending on whether the 3 per
cent margin allowed to the franchisees was passed on to the farmer. 62 While this
initiative was aimed at individual farmers, there is no reason in principle why the finance
could not be available in larger amounts for producer associations or other SMEs that
aggregate production. However, the arrangement with ICICI Bank has been
supplemented by the establishment in 2008 of a separate for-profit distribution company
called Global Easy Water Products with the help of a further equity investment from
Acumen.

Leasing
To obtain the use of a specific asset, such as a processing machine or a vehicle, leasing
offers advantages both to the finance supplier and the agricultural enterprise. The risks
and costs are both reduced, because the equipment itself is the security for the loan, and
typically it is paid for gradually, over several years. After the down payment, cash can be
conserved or used for working capital. Lease payments can be tax-deductible. Services
such as insurance and maintenance can be bundled into the leasing contract. Specialist
leasing companies can co-operate with equipment dealers, making supply possible in
rural and remote areas even where banks have little presence.
The International Finance Corporation (IFC), the commercial arm of the World Bank, has
long prioritised the encouragement of private-sector leasing activity, including services
for rural SMEs and households (see Box 4), through both technical assistance and
investment. 63 Often new legislation is needed to allow leasing within the financial
regulatory framework and under commercial contract law, and also to determine tax
treatment. Education, advocacy, and awareness-raising about the concept and its practice
are also important. Over 30 years, IFC has committed over $850m in 177 leasing projects,
and in 25 countries was an investor in the first leasing company established. In Mongolia,
for example, IFC has supported the leasing activity of a supplier of solar panels for
electricity supplied to herder households.

26 The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
Box 4. Micro-leasing for women farmers in Tanzania 64
Sero Lease and Finance is a woman-owned leasing company established in 2002 that
enables women entrepreneurs to obtain water pumps, grain-milling machines, generators,
sewing machines, and other equipment. Its expansion from 5,000 clients in 2007 to a
planned 30,000 in 2010 is being supported by a $1m loan from IFC via a local bank.

Using guarantee facilities to stimulate bank lending 65


Guarantees for agricultural credit provided by governments or donors have a chequered
history. At worst, government guarantee funds have been destroyed because of covariant
risk, or because of moral hazard: banks transferring existing troubled loans to
guarantors, and borrowers failing to repay what is seen as government money. The
guarantee facilities have also been subject, as with agricultural development banks, to
problems of governance and political intrusion, and to confusion from links with credit
subsidies. 66 However, new actors and approaches are trying to breathe new life into the
mechanism, often combining it with a value-chain approach.
In March 2009, for example, a consortium of philanthropic investors the Alliance for a
Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), backed by the Rockefeller and Gates Foundations
and the Mozambique section of the US government-backed Millennium Challenge
Account, launched a $10m guarantee facility to support a $100m agricultural lending
programme over three years by Standard Bank of Africa. Loans will be disbursed to
individual farmers, farmers groups, and agri-businesses providing inputs, processing,
and storage, across Ghana, Mozambique, Uganda, and Tanzania, aiming to benefit in all
750,000 farmers.
The guarantee will cover the bank's losses up to 20 per cent of the portfolio in the first
year; 15 per cent in the second year; and 10 per cent in subsequent years. Borrowers will
pay favourable rates of prime plus 35 per cent. Standard Bank says it plans to expand
the programme subsequently and hopes other banks may follow suit. According to
Robert Mbugua, the banks Director of Governments and International Organisations for
Africa, the optimism and ambition is based on identifying and, with the help of partners
such as AGRA, actively addressing all the major risks in smallholder farming any one
of which can severely increase default rates together with the credit programme.
Among the risk areas cited are problems with fertiliser, seeds, and soil as well as lack of
business and financial education among borrowers and their associations, all of which
AGRA is trying to address in its programmes. More problematic is tackling climate-
related risk. The hope is that weather index insurance can be extended from South Africa
to the new markets, with local insurers underwriting risks, backed up by international
reinsurance, but data availability (see heading on weather insurance below) could be a
major obstacle, and climate change will make insurance less affordable in many areas.
The bank also mentions the possibility of using futures markets to reduce price risk, and
working, again with AGRA, on storage and transport facilities to reduce transit losses.
Price risk is already being tackled for cotton and coffee by CRDB Bank Tanzania, on
behalf of its borrowers in those sectors, by a combination of forward sales and the use of
options on the New York commodity futures exchange. It also provides updated price
information to its borrowers. 67
Other risk-sharing agreements set up by AGRA and the Rockefeller Foundation
elsewhere in Africa claim to have established low default rates, below 2 per cent. 68 In
Uganda, Centenary Bank, given a 50 per cent guarantee from Rockefeller Foundation,
provided $1.6m of loans over the 20062008 period to individual farmers of green
bananas. With the support of the NGO Technoserve, they had come together in village-

27 The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
based groups and were able to sell in bulk to larger brokers, who in turn supplied
universities and hospitals. The brokers were benefiting from factoring finance from the
same bank, and the shorter and efficient supply chain had raised prices, encouraging
farmer demand for credit. The total loss on the farmer credit programme was just
$21,000. 69
Not all programmes succeed however. In Kenya, Equity Banks interest rate was lowered
from 18 to 12 per cent as a result of the 10 per cent AGRA guarantee launched in May
2008, but only about 10 per cent of the $50m was extended during the first year.
However, the reasons for this are likely to be connected with political strife rather than
problems with the financial engineering design.
In Tanzania in 2008, AGRA, jointly with the multilateral donor-funded Financial Sector
Deepening Trust, provided a $1.1m fund to provide a 50 per cent guarantee to the
National Microfinance Bank to enable it to expand its loans to agro-dealers financing
inputs to farmers, and cutting interest rates from a typical 46 per cent to 18 per cent. The
programme is initially piloted at $5m loan volume, but is planned to expand. By April
2009 $3m had been approved, though default rates are yet to emerge.
Rabobank set up its Sustainable Agriculture Guarantee Fund, now called the Rabo Agri
Fund, in 2008. All transactions are aimed at sharing risk, with banks lending to rural co-
operatives engaged in Fair Trade production for export. Target products include coffee,
cocoa, tea, nuts, oil seeds, and horticulture, sold to international buyers. Initial fund
investors, apart from the bank and its foundation, include the Dutch government, and
two Dutch NGOs, Cordaid and Solidaridad, which are also acting as advisers.
Guarantees in the form of stand-by letters of credit are for a minimum of $500,000 and a
maximum of $1m, but above that it will syndicate with others. Fees to borrowers are 1.5
2.5 per cent upfront. Risk-sharing tapers over four years from a maximum of 90 per cent
to zero, after which local banks should be able to operate without the guarantee of
support. Transactions in 2008 were done in Peru, Tajikistan, Costa Rica, Honduras,
Nicaragua, and India. The aim is to reach $30m in annual issuance of credit guarantees
during the initial three-year phase. 70
The Development Credit Authority of USAID provides external portfolio guarantees,
maximum 50 per cent, at commercial rates and over a fixed term for local commercial
banks lending to various sectors including SMEs, agriculture, micro-enterprises through
MFIs, and infrastructure. Its activities in agriculture and SMEs have been increasing over
the past decade, and the percentage guaranteed has been reducing for repeat loans. In the
year to September 2008, $32m of the total of $128m new guarantee commitments were for
agricultural lending, in five countries, supporting a credit envelope of $91m. 71
On a much smaller scale, Oxfam GB has partnered with Kafo Jiginew, a large MFI in
Mali, setting up a pilot 200,000 guarantee fund to support seasonal crop-lending to
producer co-ops diversifying away from reliance on conventional cotton. The
arrangement provides for tapered risk sharing by Oxfam at 20, 10, and 0 per cent
respectively for first-, second- and third-season loans to the same borrower, and in
principle would extend to longer-term loans for equipment or investment projects.

Transferring weather risk through index-based insurance


New index-based weather insurance models offer the promise of transferring weather
risk and thereby increasing investment in the agricultural sector, especially in upstream
production activities where there is greatest lack of capital. In contrast to traditional
insurance, whereby individual farm losses are assessed and compensated, index-based
insurance provides proxy indicators to correlate to, and hence approximate, loss.
Variables measured and indexed include air temperature, rainfall, humidity, river levels,

28 The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
and sea temperature. Payments are triggered when the index falls above or below a pre-
set threshold.
Index-based models offer a cost-effective approach to delivering insurance and its
objectivity helps remove self-selection bias and moral hazard. However, preliminary
results are only just emerging from pilot studies and recently established facilities.
Furthermore, serious obstacles have to be overcome for this kind of insurance to be
offered and its costs understood and financed. A dense network of sustainably-operating
weather stations providing locally-accurate and timely data is necessary. 72 In Mali, for
example, a recent pre-feasibility study 73 found that many weather stations are non-
operational due to the withdrawal of donor funding. Also, reliable historical data needs
to be built up to attract reinsurance companies and minimise basis risk the likelihood
that a payment is not triggered when a loss occurs, or vice versa, when a payment is
triggered without a loss.
In Mongolia, herders can purchase insurance alongside working capital loans from the
national agricultural bank to protect them against the loss of livestock from too much
snowfall. The lower default risk is recognised through an interest rate reduction. 74 In Viet
Nam, an agricultural development bank is negotiating an index-based business
interruption policy to cover up to $1m in increased operating expenses higher default
rates and loss of profit from rescheduling on its lending to rice farmers when there is
excessive flooding. The cover is less than 15 per cent of the banks estimated exposure. 75
In PepsiCos contract farming programme for potatoes in India, index-based weather
insurance is supporting expansion. 76 Previously, it was mandatory for agricultural
borrowers to purchase a government area-yield insurance product with a poor
reputation for transparency and payment. The new index-based product, offered since
2007 through a private firm, is based on humidity and temperature levels that trigger late
blight disease or frost. The premium is 35 per cent of the sum insured and covers losses
above 3040 per cent of the yield. Premium costs to farmers are partially recovered from
a price increment. Farmers buying insurance include non-borrowers. Take-up rates have
been 50 per cent or more and as high as 95 per cent in some areas. The scheme has
already been improved. New weather stations have been built to reduce high variations
in basis risk, and the payout was modified to maximise at the break-even level for
farmers. So far participation from reinsurers has not been achieved a constraint on
expanding coverage.
Putting index-based insurance into practice is lengthy and complex. In addition to
identifying, establishing, and calibrating a suitable index, stakeholders, including
farmers, lenders, insurers, and regulators have to develop contract agreements that are
well-understood and align incentives. I4 77 a new alliance of multilateral donor agencies,
an NGO, and a university rural poverty research unit, was launched in 2009 to work with
commercial insurance companies and others to design and implement a new range of
index insurance policies specifically aimed at supporting rural livelihoods.
A new difficulty for weather insurance and calculating and pricing basis risk is the effect
on agricultural yields of non-cyclical climate change and increasing water shortages. A
20062007 review of a pilot scheme for groundnut farmers in Malawi, supported by the
World Bank, analysed this. 78 The conclusion was that increased donor support will be
needed to maintain the robustness of schemes. This suggests that index-based schemes
could be a candidate for adaptation funding under the UNFCCC.
There are substantial projected increases in the frequency and severity of extreme
weather events and water scarcity. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC), climate change could reduce yields from rain-fed crops in parts of Africa
by 50 per cent as early as 2020, 79 and there are equally serious worries about effects on
cereal production in Asia and on destabilising farmland through increased water erosion

29 The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
in the Andean region of Latin America. Some commentators have suggested that
catastrophe bonds, rather than reinsurance, may be the best way that the private financial
markets can transfer covariant risks at an aggregate level and diversify them globally. 80

New models of investment finance for smallholder producers


Commercial farms are a traditional way to aggregate land and labour to support larger
investments in irrigation, infrastructure, and centralised facilities for extension services
such as supply-control systems, processing, and storage. At the other extreme are
individual farmers owning their plots and operating independently, who as we have
seen find it difficult to raise capital for undiversified activities, and are disadvantaged in
many other ways. While independent producer organisations participating in value
chains are one response, there are several other approaches to aggregating smallholders,
which work in conjunction with large-scale operations. No one approach is likely to suit
farmers across even a sub-region because land distribution; markets for inputs; access to
water; and many other factors including social norms about working together vary so
much. Having competing systems working alongside each other is also healthy in itself.
Africa Invest 81 , a UK-based investor set up in 2006, focuses on both large commercial
farms and smallholder development in Malawi. Its original business model was to build
or acquire large-scale commercial farms and to provide a range of social and health
benefits to its employees and their families in line with the Millennium Development
Goal (MDG) targets. Crops are a mixture of high-value exports, currently paprika and
chillies, rotated with staple food crops. However, the farm managers realised that
smallholders farming in areas around the commercial farm, outgrowers might be
brought in efficiently to extend crop production. They could also benefit from a range of
centrally held or delivered resources as well as organised market days and guaranteed
sale prices. Centrally available resources include good-quality chemical supplies, seeds,
discounted back-pack sprayers, and agronomy advice.
Under the Africa Invest Growers Scheme, individual smallholders form themselves into
1520 member family or village-based clubs choosing a club captain. Three or four clubs
then combine to choose a lead grower, recognised as the best farmer among them, and
typically literate, who is paid a salary. The lead grower reports to an extension
supervisor who provides advice and monitoring. Once they are linked with the hub in
this way, smallholders as a group are able to access credit though they have to raise a
15 per cent compulsory deposit and open individual accounts with the mobile units of
a local bank. 82 This has increased confidence in their permanence, repayment intentions,
and capacity. In the first two seasons, the credit was in-kind and managed on behalf of
the club by Africa Invest, which supplied inputs against it, and repayed it from sales
proceeds. In subsequent seasons, the intention, for the better performing clubs, is that the
credit will include a cash element, allowing club members to plant additional land for
food crops to be sold independently. There were 5,000 outgrowers in the period 2008
2009 and 14,000 registered for the period 20092010.
Clubs are rated by Africa Invest according to the quality of their crops; the yields they
achieve; the standard of their farming practice; how they respond to technical advice;
and their management and record-keeping. Apart from the internal social pressures that
operate within clubs, there is a control system to prevent poorly performing farmers
from moving from club to club. The vision is that clubs develop into independent SMEs.
While improved farming techniques and application of chemical inputs can go some way
to reduce the huge gap between the yield of the commercial farm and the traditional
smallholder in local staple foods including maize, rice, wheat, and potatoes bigger
yield increases depend on irrigation access. This is difficult because outgrowers are
spread over thousands of square miles, but there are pilot irrigation projects adjacent to
the commercial farms.

30 The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
Africa Invest had plans to expand its operations from Malawi to reach as many as ten
countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, if fundraising succeeded. Its public offering during the
period 20082009 to institutional and retail investors, however, with a target rate of
return of 1520 per cent, including an element of land value appreciation, was not
successful. 83
Another African agriculture proposal, also planning to include the hub-outgrower
model, is AgDevCo. 84 This is a not-for-profit-distribution company closely based on the
model of InfraCo, a publicly-funded, privately-managed infrastructure development
company (set up in 2005) operating in low-income countries in Africa and Asia. Infraco is
part of the Private Infrastructure Development Group (PIDG) owned by six European
governments and the World Bank Group.
Launched in April 2009, AgDevCo is seeking to raise $45m of front-end capital from
government and private-sector donors, which it expects, over a 10-year horizon, to
leverage at least 10 times from private commercial and development finance institutions.
This would be invested to create agricultural SMEs in Africa, both primary producers
and processors, in food crops aimed principally at local and regional consumption.
AgDevCo aims to raise smallholder productivity and income by linking every
commercial agriculture/agribusiness opportunity to a smallholder development
programme, often using the hub-outgrower model. It would build on the existing
agricultural operations by InfraCo, which has launched a hub-outgrower component,
reportedly successful, as part of an irrigation infrastructure investment in Zambia (see
Box 5). AgDevCos funding plan and investment programme also includes major
agriculture-supporting infrastructure projects, mainly irrigation, with a 20-year low-
interest payback horizon. It expects to earn returns from selling its stakes in profitable
SMEs. AgDevCo does not pay dividends to its shareholders and all returns after debt
service are recycled into developing new projects.

Box 5. Hub-outgrower farming combined with water infrastructure


InfraCos Chanyanya project in Zambia involves 120 farming families pooling their land into
one large block of 554 hectares. In return for leasing all the farmers' unused land (80 per
cent of the total area), a commercial farming company will invest in irrigation equipment to
draw water from the local Kafue area and make it available to smallholders to grow maize
and vegetables as well as to the commercial farm. With crop support also provided by the
commercial farming company, crop yields are expected to increase three- to five-fold.
Smallholders also participate in the profits of the commercial farm. 85 Once loans are repaid
over a 1012-year period, the smallholder farmers will have 100 per cent ownership of the
full project. A subsequent phase of the project currently being financed will extend the area
under production to 2,600 hectares. Local government representatives see much merit in the
project. 86

31 The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
Source: AgDevCo 87

A third example of the hub-outgrower model, and one that is established in a number of
contexts, is that used by the long-established (1968) US NGO Technoserve. It has applied
the approach of a nucleus business providing a range of services to outgrower farmers to
various crops, including coffee in Tanzania; jatropha for biofuel in Guatemala; and
pineapples and sorghum (for brewing) in Ghana. 88 The model is able to reduce credit
risks so as to substantially improve access to external financing. In the dairy sector,
Technoserve has promoted farmer-owned bulk collection and cooling centres enabling
rural farmer groups to sell to major urban processors; these centres also serve as hubs for
farm supplies and veterinary and financial services. 89

Hybrid finance or quasi-equity


In economies with well-developed financial services for SMEs, the concept of hybrid
finance, combining elements of collateral-free debt and equity is quite well known. In
France, for example, the prt participatif (participating loan) is long established, and in the
UK, the venture capital firm 3i has used debt and equity combinations extensively. There
are a number of variations including the use of unsecured long-term debt together with
an equity kicker in the form of a profit share, a royalty or an option to acquire equity.
This is triggered once certain performance milestones have been reached.
The hybrid approach suits firms that are medium-risk, and expect a moderate rather than
a spectacular growth trajectory. In contrast to classic venture capital, the hybrid
approach, sometimes called risk capital, does not require a firm exit timetable 90 for the
sale of the external equity at a substantial profit. Repayment of debt installments fulfils
the function of recycling capital as well as being a control and monitoring mechanism,
and in addition there is a running interest yield to provide regular cash-flow for the
funders. If there is equity as such, it plays a different role, and exit routes and timing can
be more flexible, often including buy-backs by the owners. Because of these advantages,
many professional investors in SMEs favour the risk capital approach over pure small-
ticket equity.
Applying the risk capital concept to SMEs in developing countries has great potential,
given the shortage of collateral, and the numbers of natural, growth-oriented
entrepreneurs with energy and ideas, but lacking the training and track records that
conservative equity investors would require. A number of risk capital investors are
already active, but so far they have avoided the agricultural sector, where risks and
returns are less favourable, and ambitious entrepreneurs perhaps less common.
A leading exponent of the hybrid approach is GroFin, 91 a privately-owned South-African
company, which began operations in 2003 but now has more than $250m under
management and over 100 employees. Its approach received early endorsement from the
Shell Foundation, which remains a strong supporter.
Grofins model of flexible finance combined with intensive support for business strategy
and development money and mentoring has been tested and refined through its
management of a number of small funds ($10m$20m range raised from a mix of
sources) investing in high-growth SMEs in South and East Africa. The finance package,
in amounts between $50,000 and $1m, typically contains unsecured or partially
collateralised debt, and a royalty payment based on performance. Expected overall
returns, made up of fixed and performance-related elements, range from 15 to 30 per cent
per annum depending on the investment risk, and interest charges are higher than bank
loans to reflect the risk levels. Repayment is normally phased over four to six years.
Grofin has now scaled up its operation. Its new 10-year fund closed in August 2009 at
$170m, attracting support from major development finance institutions, plus corporate
foundations as well as the European Investment Bank. The target IRR (internal rate of

32 The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
return) is 10 per cent. GroFin's nine in-country teams will invest in some 500 privately-
owned SMEs in manufacturing, retail and services over the next five years, spread across
Nigeria, Ghana, Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and South Africa.
Primary agriculture 92 has not figured as a sector for Grofin. The risks have been
considered too high 93 especially with the prospect of climate change. It does however
finance secondary agricultural activities when there is value addition to the primary
agricultural produce. One investee, for example, is an exporter of organic honey and
mangoes.
On a much smaller scale of operation, but specifically targeted to agriculture, Oxfam GB
began its own hybrid approach to investment in 2008 (see Box 6).

Box 6. Oxfams Enterprise Development Programme


The Enterprise Development Programme works with embryonic producer organisations
committed to gender equality, in high-poverty and often remote regions, to build sustainable
agriculture-based enterprises using a mixture of loans and grants, backed up by advice and
support from local Oxfam partners and mentors.
Grants are primarily for training and building capacity, but extend to the financing of initial
losses while the business builds up to break-even scale of operation. In that sense this is
also a hybrid finance approach to business investment. Oxfam is seeking to build the
credibility of loan finance in a context where grants are the norm. It does not want to build
ownership stakes in these enterprises for resale, nor does it expect a high rate of return, but
it is hoping to be able to recycle donor funds from loan repayments and interest into new
rounds of investees. The programme, currently with a 1m portfolio of 11 investments, is in
its very early stages, with proof of concept yet to be achieved.
Source: Oxfam GB

Overview
These examples show that lending to, and investment in, agriculture demands an
innovative approach and a proper understanding of the risks of the sector and how they
can be managed with complementary inputs. Commercial banks in particular find it
difficult to innovate as they are constrained by legal and regulatory pressures as well as
by the demands of depositors, shareholders, and central bank supervisors. There are
exceptions, such as Rabobank, which has a unique agricultural and co-operative heritage.
It has a dedicated agricultural risk-management centre.
However, in general, the diverse financial mechanisms and approaches being applied to
the missing middle are changing attitudes about risk and performance in the sector. They
are also challenging received perceptions of the level of entrepreneurship, sophistication
and skilled labour among smallholder farmers and their organisations. The ongoing
challenge will be to continue to identify, evaluate, and match the available financing
tools with the capabilities and appetite for risk of the producers, their organisations, and
capital providers themselves.

33 The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
6. Improving the infrastructure for financial
services
Infrastructure supporting financial services covers the legal and regulatory environment,
the provision of information for market actors, and the cost of communications.
Improvements in infrastructure can result in lower costs, reduced risks or both. Once in
place, such developments act to raise the returns available from lending and investment
in SME agriculture.

Credit information bureaux can reduce transaction costs


Transaction costs for formal finance sector lenders dealing with SME loans include the
time and effort of assessing borrower character. Credit bureau information about the
creditworthiness of potential borrowers, both their credit histories and their current
indebtedness, can greatly reduce these costs. The received wisdom, however, is that
small and rural entities will fall beyond the radar of credit bureaux, not just because of
their size but also because so much of their dealing is with the informal finance sector.
But if two conditions are met, then unregulated entities will find it attractive to
participate in sharing credit information. First, all regulated lenders must be required by
the supervisory authority to report all loans of any size to a credit bureau (either a
government sponsored one or a privately run service). 94 Second, unregulated entities
need to be permitted to participate based on reciprocity (information must be given in
order to be obtained). It is also crucial, however, that the operating rules of credit
bureaux prevent the release of lender identity when a credit report is requested, in order
to avoid attempts to steal good clients from other lenders.

More effective collateral guarantees


Another way of reducing lender transaction costs and risks is increasing the effectiveness
of collateral guarantees. Use of formal collateral guarantees may be attractive for the
larger and longer term of the missing middle, but only if the necessary infrastructure is
in place (for example, accessible and inexpensive registries for land and other assets,
functioning commercial courts and markets for assets, including movable goods, taken as
collateral). Extending the forms of collateral to include jewellery and other household
items, as well as crops and livestock, can improve womens borrowing power. 95
The need to promote functioning markets for rural land is often overlooked, but lenders
are normally not interested in collateralising rural land that they might have to farm.
This is because, in the context of many rural communities, it cannot be sold outside the
community, if at all. This explains why lenders often insist instead on urban houses as
collateral. Furthermore, recommendations such as reducing notary requirements and
their costs for collateralisation can be very important but may not get implemented
because of protectionism by the profession. In Colombia, for example, most congressmen
and senators are notaries and directly control admission of individuals to notary status.
These and other political economy barriers to improving collateral infrastructure have
often been overlooked. 96
Collateral substitutes, such as leasing and factoring services and the use of warehouse
receipts, also need a supportive legal infrastructure if they are to succeed. The prime
example of attention devoted to this aspect is IFCs work across the globe on improving
the legal and regulatory infrastructure for leasing, as noted earlier.

34 The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
Better regulation of SME lending
Traditional approaches to regulation by banking supervisory authorities tend to place
substantial weight on the existence of documentary proof of formal collateral, or on the
presence of official documents, such as up-to-date tax returns or audited financial
statements, in classifying loans. When these are absent, provisions against future losses
are automatically required. Clearly, banks and other regulated lenders are less likely to
lend to potential borrowers when such loans would require initial provisions that would
have an immediate negative impact on lender profitability. Both the impact on profits
and the increased perception of risk are likely to increase the hesitancy of banks to enter
the fields of microfinance and SME lending in rural areas.
The shift to risk-based supervision, which is now seen to be the norm, can help to reduce
the bias against micro- and SME-lending in rural areas when it is effectively
implemented by regulatory agencies. With risk-based supervision, it is the ability to
manage risks that makes lending sound and not simply adherence to arbitrary rules that
may be largely inapplicable. 97
Nonetheless, risk-based supervision will not eliminate this bias unless it is effectively
implemented, which requires a major re-orientation and training for supervisory
personnel. Otherwise, bank examiners will continue to regard the lack in a loan file of
certain documents and/or evidence of collateral as reason to classify a particular loan as
risky, and possibly even to question the overall risk-management capabilities of the
lender. 98 Furthermore, continuing to focus on these traditional indicators of risk on a
loan-by-loan basis can lead to neglecting a far more important aspect of risk in micro-
and SME- lending in rural areas, specifically the potential lack of diversification and
management techniques to deal with this type of risk.

Use of mobile technologies


SMEs in rural areas can benefit through reduced transaction costs in payment services,
running deposit accounts, and in accessing and servicing loans offered by branchless
banking. Channels include mobile phones, POS (point of sale devices), smart cards, and
ATMs. Mobile bank branches are also important in this respect. Mobile phones can also
improve price transparency (and other useful information flows) for farmers. The rural
poor have greatly expanded their use of mobile phones as coverage has improved and
costs come down. In the Philippines, for example, a country with more than 7,000
islands, over 95 per cent of land area is covered and over 95 per cent of families have a
least one mobile phone. However, there is a certain degree of hype about the global
success so far of branchless banking, even for urban households where it has the best
prospects. Very few examples exist that are both serving more than 1 million poor clients
and making a profit through doing so. 99
The potential for huge cost savings through mobile phone banking was seen by the
leaders of a USAID-funded project to assist the hundreds of rural banks in the
Philippines. Mobile phone companies there found it could be very profitable. By
allowing people to deposit cash into their own mobile phone account and make transfer
payments into the accounts of other mobile users, the phone companies could avoid the
2030 per cent that they were paying to wholesalers and retailers to distribute pre-paid
air time. Moreover, officials of the financial regulatory authority likewise saw the
potential and put in place forceful yet flexible rules to deal with security, secrecy, anti-
money laundering, access to information, and so on, in ways that did not significantly
increase costs. Nonetheless, there have been barriers to the hoped-for rate of expansion,
not on technical or regulatory aspects, but rather on practical aspects such as handing the
deposit and withdrawal of cash from the system and covering a sufficiently wide range
of transaction types. 100

35 The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
Standard Chartered in Pakistan uses credit cards to provide unsecured lines of credit of
up to $2000 to farmers to finance the procurement of agricultural inputs. An unlimited
number of withdrawals and payments can be made through the Banks network of 325
authorised merchants that sell agricultural inputs and carry card-reader devices. The
facility uses six-member groups to manage and enforce repayment. It charges 30 per cent
interest and is renewed every six months at the end of the crop cycle. As of mid-2008, the
Kissan Card had over 16,000 customers.
Standard Chartered also offers a complementary revolving credit line of up to $450,000
for input suppliers. The product has a fixed rate of 15.5 per cent and is serviceable
monthly. By 2009, it was reaching 265 retailers with $12m outstanding. The facility is
promoting downstream business growth and ensures more reliable supplies for Kissan
customers. 101
Price transparency, while not directly related to the supply of finance, can radically
improve returns and thus the bankability of rural enterprises. In Uganda, members of a
dairy co-operative, 120km from Kampala markets, use mobiles phones connected by a
booster antenna to the nearest cell network to find buyers, negotiate prices, and organise
delivery of milk. Previously, farmers faced significant losses due to milk spoiling during
transport and at market waiting for sales to be confirmed. Farmers use the system,
financed by a $350 loan from a local MFI, to get up-to-date information about prices for a
range of commodities and regular weather reports via SMS (text message). The
information service tells farmers which buyers are offering the best prices and gives their
contact information. 102

Networks for international SME investors


Lastly, a different aspect of financial system infrastructure is improving: the facility for
interested actors to share information, ideas, and experience at a strategic level. New
industry-level networks are emerging to help accelerate the connection of capital with
investment opportunities in SMEs, with a global focus that includes developing
countries.
The Finance Alliance for Sustainable Trade (FAST) and the Aspen Network for
Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) are two recently launched member-based
associations that bring together leading investors, practitioners, entrepreneurs, donors,
and other stakeholders. FAST focuses specifically on promoting finance for SMEs within
the sustainably produced product market. ANDEs mandate covers small and growing
businesses in any sector. Together, these associations have broad agendas and unique
projects to support the management of funds, facilitate investor and investee
relationships, deliver direct assistance to SMEs, and co-ordinate market research and
knowledge dissemination.

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Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
7. The private sector and the missing middle

Responsibility and opportunity


The number of chronically hungry people worldwide has exceeded 1 billion for the first
time. Despite the worlds pledge to decrease hunger by 50 per cent by 2015 under the
MDGs, development assistance to agriculture was in 2007 down to only 4.6 per cent of all
aid, compared to 18 per cent in 1979. 103 Less than 1 per cent of commercial lending in
Africa is going to agriculture. 104
Over the last 30 years, Africa has gone from being a net exporter to a net importer of
food, and crop yields are no higher than they were in 1980. 105 Staple food prices are 50
per cent lower than last years peak, but they remain at a level higher than in 2008, when
the crisis began, and are likely to take off again as the supply and demand gap widens. 106
With the onset of the food crisis, agriculture has surged to the top of the international
political and economic agenda. World leaders are looking for ways to reinvigorate the
global economy and bring jobs and incomes to rural areas. They are being advised to
invest heavily in sustainable agriculture, and especially in pro-poor policies, which will
get capital to smallholder farmers to produce for local and regional markets. Investment
in better land use, water conservation, and drought-resistant crops can help farmers
adapt to climate change. 107 Investment in labour-saving infrastructure and technology,
particularly for activities traditionally undertaken by women, such as obtaining water
and fuel, can raise marginal productivity to deliver both economic and developmental
returns. Women generally spend a greater proportion of their income on food to improve
household food security and nutrition.
Investment in the missing middle is one critical way to move toward achieving social,
economic, and environmental change but it cannot be done without substantial
involvement from the private sector. There are concerns that governments increased
attention to agriculture, as a key element of their economic stimulus initiatives, may be
offset 108 by reduced credit and investment from the private financial sector. These
concerns feed into the new thinking by strategic decision-makers in financial institutions,
and their regulators, about sustainable long-term opportunities, after the huge damage
precipitated by excessive and short-term risk-taking. A serious look at agriculture, within
the context of global food-supply and climate change, should be part of this rethink.

Better returns
With the increase in food demand driven by population growth; greater food
dependency as a result of migration from rural to urban areas; and changes in dietary
preferences, the agricultural sector is becoming more attractive. In May 2009, The
Economist highlighted that, no matter how hard things get, people still need to eat and
argued that at a time when much of the global economy is falling apart and demand
both for consumer goods and the firms that make and finance them is collapsing, the
notoriously cyclical world of agriculture is holding up notoriously well. 109
The potential productivity gains in developing country agriculture from the application
of technology, both basic and innovative, are huge. New technology alone is not expected
to drive a major transformation in the short term. Greater use of existing, inaccessible,
and underused technologies, such as efficient irrigation, fertiliser, seed selection as well
as improved market access and transport, are likely to facilitate big gains and improve
returns in the short term. Further productivity gains, and incidentally greater emissions
reductions, could come from the cost-effective provision of knowledge-based inputs,

37 The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
which are not only less dependent on external finance, but are also designed to promote
long-term sustainable farming practices. Among these are integrated pest, water, and
fertiliser management approaches. As well as government extension programmes, this
kind of agro-ecological advice is sometimes available for farmers in the supply chains of
food manufacturers committed to a sustainable business approach. An example is
PepsiCos work with contract farming of rice in Punjab, where an independent survey
found that inputs including irrigation requirements have been reduced while
maintaining yields. 110
Agricultural SMEs are just emerging as a potential stand-alone asset class. While the
sector remains small, many risks and inefficiencies are being reduced through financial
innovation and human capital development. Early movers in the more established
commodity and Fair Trade segments are demonstrating ways that such enterprises can
be viable and profitable banking and investment partners. Over the next few years, the
track record of high repayment performance and competitive return expectations should
be widened within the sector.

Pro-poor growth prospects


According to Robert Mbugua, Standard Bank of Africas Director of Governments and
International Organisations, the trick to serving agricultural SMEs (both primary
producers and downstream activities) is being able to identify all the risks, which are
generally feared yet little understood. He predicts that major profits can be made, if you
can crack open a way of lending to agriculture; its such a big field. It could be a big
growth field. 111
Africa is considered the last great frontier for agricultural investment. Agriculture
already contributes at least 40 per cent of exports; 30 per cent of GDP; 30 per cent of
foreign exchange earnings; and 7080 per cent of employment. Of the 30 fastest growing
agricultural economies in the world, 17 are in sub-Saharan Africa. 112 Africa has a larger
variety of staple crops than Asia and Latin America and offers significant opportunities
for increasing production for local and regional markets.
The potential for increasing production of food is very large. Africa has a total arable
land area of 167m hectares, of which currently only 28m hectares is used for crop
production. Of this less than 3 per cent of the farmed area is irrigated, compared to 30 per
cent in South Asia and 29 per cent in East Asia, 113 despite a total of 53m 114 hectares of
available inland water. Farm productivity in Africa is just one quarter of the global
average. 115 Low use of fertilisers 116 mean about 75 per cent of sub-Saharan African
farmland is affected by severe loss of soil nutrients. 117
According to one estimate, 118 the potential income for African farmers by 2030 from
export markets is $4.5bn and from domestic and cross-border markets, $30bn.
Regions such as Latin America and Asia, which have more developed agricultural
economies, are well-poised to diversify into higher-value goods. Increasing incomes and
urbanisation are shifting dietary preferences away from cereals toward higher-value
products such as livestock for meat and milk products, fish, and fruits and vegetables.
Horticulture, in particular, provides ten times the return as cereals. 119

Scaling-up financing solutions


The process of scaling-up financing solutions for the missing middle may take longer and
have more obstacles to overcome, at least in agriculture, than it did in microfinance. That
began with philanthropic capital and, as it has matured, a minority of urban micro-credit
operations have already become able to offer acceptable risk-adjusted rates of return and
attract diverse sources of private capital. 120 Several MFIs, originally donor projects, have

38 The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
become full service banks and have reduced or eliminated their dependence on soft
finance sources. A handful of micro-credit providers have achieved high rates of return
but many observers believe this has come as a result of exploiting vulnerable borrowers,
thus losing the underlying social context. 121 SME agriculture, however, because it is
clearly primarily an economic development tool and only secondarily a short-term
poverty alleviation mechanism, may be able to establish itself as an asset class while
avoiding this controversial phase.
SME agriculture will also benefit from improvements in physical and regulatory
infrastructure that have been discussed. More instances of creative combinations of
actors from the commercial banking, insurance, and investment worlds; the new
philanthropic capitalist foundations; and reformed and strengthened public-sector and
co-operative finance provider networks, will also boost it. The World Banks new
Agricultural Finance Support Facility 122 funded by a $20m contribution from the Gates
Foundation underlines the co-operative approach. It will make grants to bank and non-
bank institutions for activities to increase access to financial services for smallholder
farmers, but as profitable business lines.

Buyers and intermediaries in agricultural value chains are another important element
reducing risks for external finance and supplying internal finance along the chain.
Early movers in the missing middle market are making strategic investments in higher-
risk projects that give credibility to SMEs in poor countries, and are developing options
for lower-risk and longer-term follow-up capital injections. These efforts are ramping up,
though so far primary agriculture is not a favoured sector, except for the restricted
segment favoured by the more socially-oriented funds. The size and spread of credit
commitments to the SME agriculture sector from regional and international banks is
already increasing, though as with investment, reliable commercial returns have yet to be
proven. Yet the trend is a sign of increased confidence in the capacity and
entrepreneurship of agricultural SMEs and the potential for growth and profits in the
sector.
Root Capital recently launched a $63m capital-raising campaign to triple its loan
portfolio, which would allow the fund to lend $121m each year to 350 grassroots
businesses. 123 That is roughly the cumulative amount lent since it started operations in
1999 and will provide the scale needed for the organisation to break even. Root Capital is
just one example of how financial services embedded or linked with value chains can be
expected to continue to grow as the integration of production and marketing systems
intensifies with globalisation. 124
On the banking side, the Standard Bank of Africas $100m multi-country lending
programme, backed by tapering risk-sharing support from Rockefeller and AGRA
foundations, will be an important test of returns in SME agriculture. Mitigation of
weather risk and market price risk are complementary to this effort, but the use of both
index-based insurance and futures markets is still in the pilot phase.
Unlocking agricultural enterprises access to domestic commercial banks, including
reformed agricultural development banks, will also be essential to close the missing
middle gap. Encouragement for banks to address the sector and innovate with partners
to reduce costs and risks should be the responsibility of the central bank. Local banks
have the scale of capital, presence, and cost-base to be competitive, but they need
sufficient means of diversification, and access to extra liquidity in difficult seasons. Some
local banks need to supplement their demand-deposit bases, though, as noted earlier,
these are more stable than commonly perceived, with additional sources of funds,
preferably with longer maturities, for lending to SMEs. All banks need properly
incentivised lending officers at branch level. Larger banks, internally better diversified,

39 The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
need to have both effective delegation and strong internal control to make the most of
local opportunities.
The judicious use of the guarantee mechanism is increasingly recognised as one key to
expanding commercial bank lending. Extending its use to social lenders, who have up to
now focused on the Fair Trade segment but are interested in extending to more
conventional areas, is a project by the trade association FAST. 125 The aim is to improve
access by removing existing barriers, developing instruments for facilitating access, and
to the degree appropriate, creating a sector-specific guarantee fund.
For longer-term enterprise development, quasi-equity financial mechanisms backed by
hands-on business development support from local investor teams are gaining
momentum, but have yet to extend into the agriculture sector. Moving them down the
value chain from the processing stage can be one route, but again there will be need for
sustainable and affordable risk transfer services to be in place.

40 The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
8. Summary and conclusions

Addressing financial costs and risks


Producer associations and other agricultural SMEs are exposed to a narrower range of
crop, market, and other risks in comparison to rural household micro-enterprises, which
adopt a diversified strategy for survival. This implies that lenders face higher costs in
appraising and monitoring a loan because they need to analyse the specific aspects of the
enterprise. Also, because of the larger sizes and likely longer periods for such loans,
lenders have to become involved with collateral or other more formal guarantees. Private
sector lenders can recover these higher transaction costs from interest rate margins and
fees but only on fairly large loans. In many cases, agricultural SMEs are too small to
absorb this amount of external capital: hence, the missing middle.
Local lenders, whether commercial banks, rural financial co-operatives, or larger MFIs,
have an advantage of intimate knowledge of local clientele and their operations, but have
a concomitant problem of lack of ready diversification. This requires attention, in part
through sources of liquidity that allow them to survive during the inevitable bad times in
their locales.
The promise of index-based weather insurance as a mechanism for transferring and
pooling risk is great, and expectations are high. However, the technical barriers to its
introduction in each locality are usually high, the lead times are long, and the
affordability is a potential barrier. Another key hurdle for the mechanism to overcome is
climate change. This is imposing a long-term trend of increasing risk, making the
insurance approach more difficult to apply, and more expensive.
Nationwide lenders, including larger commercial banks and agricultural development
banks, are better diversified the latter to a lesser extent but very often do not have
good systems for delegating decisions to local rural branches. This requires some training
and technical assistance to help them create incentives for decisions at the local level and,
at the same time, closer attention to internal audit and financial controls, so that
delegation is not abused. Many agricultural development banks need substantial reform
in this and other respects before they can make a strong contribution.
Commercial banks in developing countries are not naturally innovative, because they are
constrained by legal and regulatory pressures and are risk-averse, on behalf of depositors
and conservative shareholders. They will need encouragement, but not direction, 126 from
central banks to address the risks of the agriculture sector, in alliance with partners and
complementary inputs.
Government-imposed interest-rate ceilings and subsidised interest rates should be
avoided, not only because they are unsustainable in themselves but also because they
crowd out sustainable private-sector initiatives. Because the payoff is demonstrably large
and so much more certain than intervening directly in the financial markets, government
and donor resources are better directed to supporting infrastructure improvements, both
financial and non-financial.
Risk-sharing, through partial credit guarantees is a more promising approach, since it
works with the grain of the private sector. It also works in the direction of longer-term
finance for enterprise development, something which commercial banks are unwilling to
embark on alone. New guarantors are emerging in the shape of powerful philanthropic
foundations, sometimes in alliance with IFIs, and banks with social as well as financial
goals, and a strong agricultural pedigree, such as Rabobank. They use a more
sophisticated approach to guarantee contracts, including a tapering element for example,

41 The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
and benefit from lessons of past experience. They are thus likely to avoid repeating the
many past failures of government guarantee funds in the agricultural sector.

Releasing effective demand


Effective demand for missing middle finance is also constrained by a number of factors:
too few smallholders are aggregated in producer organisations, hub-outgrower schemes
or other grouping arrangements. Larger individual farmers need access to savings and
insurance products, often not available, as well as credit, if they are to handle the range
of risks it brings. Formal collateral is frequently lacking.
Women farmers, who are especially disadvantaged by educational discrimination;
limited mobility; lack of land rights; and social norms, are virtually excluded from
agricultural credit and extension services, despite heading up one in five farms; making
up most of the agricultural workforce; and sometimes being capable of greater
productivity gains than men farmers. Organisational capacity; a business culture; and
specific finance management skills are often lacking in producer associations, of both
women and men, making them unacceptable as potential borrowers or investees.
Many of these constraints are being tackled by a range of (mainly) non-profit actors,
offering technical assistance often bundled with brokering access to external finance, or
actual financial supply. Among these are non-government organisations specialising in
business development, such as Root Capital, Technoserve, PRIDE Africa, and bank-
linked foundations such as Rabobank Foundation. However, these efforts are usually
focused on easier market segments, involving high-value export commodities or Fair
Trade goods, and relatively large transactions. For producers, especially women, in
remote or difficult areas, where transactions are smaller in scale, and oriented more to
local food markets, there is more scope for poverty-focused NGOs, such as Oxfam. For
these NGOs business development is seen not as the central goal, but rather as a solution
to the absence of sustainable livelihoods and a contribution to alleviating household
poverty.
The adoption of sustainable agriculture practice, especially for farmers in remote less
productive areas, using a LEITapproach is a promising alternative approach to raising
productivity, which requires less external capital to finance fertiliser and other inputs,
and has long-term advantages, environmental and social, including congruence with
carbon sequestration. This is a reminder that maximising the application of capital, or the
effective demand for it, is not always the correct approach.

Improving infrastructure financial and non-financial


Part of the higher transaction costs for lenders comes from the collateralisation process,
both perfection (establishing clear legal rights over the asset pledged) and execution
(recovering the value of the collateral in the event of default). Therefore, improvements
generating flexibility and ease of operation are important. Among these are asset
registries; working markets for land in rural areas; and regulations permitting
collateralisation of a range of moveable property, including jewellery. A complementary
approach is to extend the use of collateral substitutes such as leasing, factoring and
contract finance.
The availability of a borrowers credit history reduces the lenders risk. Thus credit
information bureaux are valuable. To work well, reporting, even for the smallest loans,
needs to be mandatory for all regulated institutions, and the bureau should be open to
non-regulated lenders including phone companies and other utilities on the basis of
reciprocity (providing data to get data). Confidentiality must also be respected (no names
of lenders) to avoid stealing of good clients.

42 The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
Another barrier to extending SME lending is the persistence of bank supervision, based
solely on documentation and rigid norms, for example, using ratios and seeing if loan
files have audited financial statements, documented collateral, etc. Although regulators
pay lip service to risk-based supervision, few have introduced effective regimes, as the
old approach is easier. The new basis means assessing a lenders ability to manage risks
systematically, in particular the risks that come from the challenges of diversification and
delegation.
Local financial suppliers, such as small commercial banks; rural financial co-operatives;
or larger MFIs, can address the missing middle segment more easily if they have apex
organisations or their equivalent, which can diversify risk and provide emergency
liquidity. Donors and governments have already made contributions to institutional
strengthening of this kind and there is scope for further work.
There is more institutional strengthening to be done in reforming national agricultural
development banks, which may or may not benefit from privatisation. Again,
multilateral donors are important supporters of national governments here.
Electronic and mobile technologies can make a big contribution to improving the
infrastructure for financial transactions in rural areas, positively affecting both demand
and supply. The use of cellphones and POS devices is particularly beneficial, and their
extension to more SME transaction types is desirable. At the same time, attention needs
to be paid to dealing with regulatory impediments to their use.
Non-financial physical infrastructure water supply and conservation; power
distribution, roads, transport, telecommunications, schools, health posts, and so on is
usually relatively neglected in rural areas, which obviously weakens farming at all scales
and all other rural economic activities, including the finance services sector itself. This is
a local government responsibility, though judicious donor support in the form of
technical assistance and partial funding can obviously help.
Another high priority for government within non-financial infrastructure is the
sponsorship of local, participative agricultural R&D.

Combining aggregation, market linkage, and finance


An important theme in this paper has been that while there is no doubt that aggregating
smallholder agriculture improves access to markets, both directly and through
intermediary or downstream organisations, the financial constraint may not be so easily
relieved because risks and transaction costs are high in relation to expected returns.
Finance along, or linked to, tightly integrated and hence lower-risk value chains, while a
valid way of addressing the problem, cannot be the whole answer to the scale of
resources needed for smallholder farmers, most of whom, women especially, are not as
yet organised in associations. So far, value-chain finance has been mainly concentrated in
higher-value export crops or commodities, rather than in staple food production for local
or regional markets. External finance provided directly can also better preserve the
independence of the primary producers, and encourages the development of local
financial institutions.
The most common form of aggregation is the producer association. Other aggregation
and market-linkage models, such as the hub-outgrower model and various forms of
contract farming, offer an alternative to individual farmers, both those on family plots,
and more commonly those with larger landholdings, who want to remain more
independent. Again, some of these are focused on international markets, but others are
combining local food production and export crops. External finance is sometimes present
as a component in these arrangements, leveraged in by the reduction in risk brought
about by market linkage.

43 The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
Concerted and multiple actions required
This paper has sought to show that while the reason for the missing middle finance gap
in agriculture is fairly straightforward, eliminating it requires a multi-track approach to
match the complex pattern of demand, supply, and infrastructure features.
Overemphasising one solution affecting one type of transaction with its characteristic
features and types of participants will not do.
In particular, setting up new institutional arrangements or intermediaries to divert scarce
public or donor capital always adds costs, and does not in itself reduce risk, or increase
returns. The possible benefits of this type of response, often put in the category of
learning, or demonstration of viability, need to be carefully assessed against the danger
of duplication of similar initiatives and the opportunity costs for all players involved of
employing the resources in this way.
Many of the promising initiatives aimed at reducing the missing middle finance gap
identified in this paper rely on combinations of actors, playing to their respective
strengths. The common theme is working with the grain of the private sector to remove
frictions of various kinds, thus improving the balance between risk, cost, and return. In
this way, scale should be achieved. A number of those cited in the paper are reviewed
below.
NGOs with a financial focus and a business development culture are often
essential, at least in the early stages, creating linkages and networks between
financial suppliers, women and men producers, buyers, and other service
providers.
Multilateral donors can be key sponsors of financial sector reform programmes
working with national governments and central banks. Reforms can focus on
specific institutions, such as agricultural development banks, or rural financial
co-operatives; on better regulation; on improvements to financial infrastructure;
and on removing barriers to competition in the supply of rural finance.
Donors and IFIs have pump-primed innovative financing mechanisms, such as
warehouse receipts and leasing.
Alliances have been forged between commercial banks and non-financial
distribution networks, for example, of irrigation equipment or mobile phone
services.
Socially responsible investors of various kinds have been important in fairly
traded transaction financing, either working directly or in conjunction with
banks. There are a few examples of business development investment in
activities closely linked to primary agriculture.
Foundations and socially-oriented banks are offering partial and temporary
guarantees on a commercial basis, sometimes working with other risk-mitigation
mechanisms, to encourage commercial banks to take the small-scale agricultural
sector seriously as a profitable market segment.
Poverty-focused NGOs have explored the possibilities of building capacity in
womens and mens smallholder groups, and other small-scale producer
associations, in remote and difficult locations and then brokering linkages to
formal sources of finance to support livelihoods.
Continuation of these and other efforts will be needed, as well as careful and
independent evaluations of what works and what does not, if progress to solving the
missing middle gap is to be maintained and indeed accelerated.

44 The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
Notes

1Lennart Bage, Supporting smallholders is crucial to food security (as published in the
G8 Summit special report of the Financial Times, 7July 2008).
Hhttp://www.ifad.org/events/op/2008/g8.htmH (last accessed 17 November 2009).
2 Several studies show that the returns to capital for agriculture can be very high in many
developing countries: Christopher Udry and Santosh Anagol, (2006) The return to capital
in Ghana Yale University Economic Growth Center Discussion Paper No. 932; S. de Mel,
David McKenzie and C. Woodruff (2008) Returns to capital: Results from a randomized
experiment Quarterly Journal of Economics, forthcoming.
3 Lennart Bage, op. cit.
4About 90 per cent of the very large potential for GHG abatement from agriculture could
be achieved through soil carbon (C) sequestration. Enabling Agriculture To Contribute
To Climate Change Mitigation, FAO Submission to UNFCCC March 2009
Hhttps://unfccc.int/resource/docs/2008/smsn/igo/036.pdfH (last accessed 20 October
2009).
5 Anne Perkins (2008) The Future for Agriculture in Africa guardian.co.uk 9 July (last

accessed 17 November 2009).


6 Lennart Bage, op. cit.
7Standard Bank of Africa, AGRA, and MCA Mozambique (2009) Fact Sheet: New Loan
Programme for African Agricultural Development Hwww.agra-
alliance.org/.../911_file_AGRA_SBG_MCA_Fact_Sheet_Approved_March18.pdfH (last
accessed 17 November 2009).
8See, for example: Hans Dieter Seibel, Thorsten Giehler and Stefan Karduck (2005)
Reforming Agricultural Development Banks, Eschborn: GTZ.
9 Brian Milder (2008) Closing the gap: reaching the missing middle and rural poor
through value-chain finance Enterprise Development & Microfinance Vol. 19, No. 4,
December 2008.
10 The view that agriculture is of overriding importance in rural areas was dispelled as

early as the 1970s by the work of Karl Liedholm and others at Michigan State University.
11
World Bank (2007) World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development
Washington DC: World Bank.
12 The Moznosti Savings Bank.
13
This point was endorsed by several interviewees, including Emma Caddy, Director
ERM Foundation Low Carbon Enterprise Fund and by Roy Parizat, Project Director,
FAST Finance Alliance for Sustainable Trade.
14 Lennart Bage, op. cit.
15 J. Hartell, and J. Skees, (2009) Pre-feasibility Analysis: Index-based weather risk
transfer in Mali, Westport: Save the Children, Washington DC: USAID, and Lexington:
GlobalAgRisk Inc.
16E. Duflo, M. Kremer, and J. Robinson (2009) Nudging Farmers to Use Fertilizer:
Evidence from Kenya Hwww.econ.upf.edu/docs/seminars/duflo.pdfH (last accessed 17
November 2009).

45 The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
17Jules Pretty, (2008) Agricultural sustainability:concepts, principles and evidence Phil.
Trans. R. Soc. B 12 February 2008 vol. 363 no. 1491 447-465
Hhttp://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/363/1491/447.abstract
(last accessed 17 November 2009).
18 Carbon sequestration involves a variety of practices that either increase the amount of

carbon added to soils (as plant residues and manure) and/or reduce the relative rate of
CO2 released through soil respiration, for example, low tillage.
19 FAO (Food and Agriculture Organsiation) (2009) Enabling Agriculture To Contribute To

Climate Change Mitigation, FAO Submission to UNFCCC March 2009


Hhttp://www.scidev.net/en/key-documents/enabling-agriculture-to-contribute-to-climate-
chan.htmlH (last accessed 17 November 2009).
20 K. Gallagher (2001) Stopping Subsidies for Pesticides in Indonesian Rice Production,

Sustainable Development International, Hwww.p2pays.org/ref/40/39707.pdfH (last


accessed 17 November 2009).
21 World Bank (2007), op. cit. p154.
22The sequence of economic activities during which value is added at each stage from
the growing of crops on farms via processing, marketing, transport, and distribution to the
sale of food products in shops.
23
FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) (2007) FAO Focus: Women and Food
Security Hhttp://www.fao.org/FOCUS/E/Women/WoHm-e.htmH (last accessed 17
November 2009)
24
FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation) (2009b) World Summit Food Security Fact
Sheet: Women, Agriculture, and Food Security
Hwww.fao.org/worldfoodsummit/english/fsheets/women.pdfH (last accessed 17
November 2009)
25Carolyn Hannan (2008) Remarks on The situation of rural women: Providing tools for
economic empowerment United Nations, New York, 16 October 2008.
Hhttp://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/news/statements08.htmH (last accessed 17
November 2009).
26 FAO (2009b), op.cit.
27Lack of land rights include restrictions on ownership and inheritance affecting both the
absolute amount and the average size of plot compared to men. For country level detail
on percentage ownership by women of rural land see FAO (2007) Gender and law:
Womens rights in agriculture, Legislative Study No. 76, revised 2007, Rome, FAO.
28 Christopher Udry, John Hoddinot, Harold Alderman, and Lawrence Haddad (1995)

Gender Differentials in Farm Productivity: Implications for Household Efficiency and


Agricultural Policy, Food Policy, Vol. 20, No. 5 (1995);
29World Bank, FAO, and IFAD (2009) Gender in Agriculture SourceBook Washington
DC: World Bank
Hhttp://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTGENAGRLIVSOUBOOK/Resources/CompleteBo
ok.pdfH (last accessed November 2009).
30Richard L. Meyer, and Nagarajan Geetha, (1996) Credit Guarantee Schemes for
Developing Countries: Theory, Design and Evaluations unpublished report prepared for
the African Bureau, US Agency for International Development, Washington DC, 15 April
1996.
31 In the cotton region of Mali, for example, village associations were transformed

overnight by legal decree into co-operatives and expected to begin operating as

46 The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
enterprises, diversifying into non-cotton activities. Oxfam GB has a programme of
capacity-building for co-operatives in the area.
32M. D. Wenner, S. Navajas, C. Trivelli, and A. Tarazona (2007) Managing credit risk in
rural financial institutions: what seems to work Enterprise Development & Microfinance
Vol. 18 No. 2/3, 2007, pp.158-75.
33 As collected in Dale W Adams, D. H. Graham, and J. D. Von Pischke, eds.,

Undermining Rural Development with Cheap Credit, Westview Press, 1984. Vogel,
Robert C. and Donald W. Larson. "Limitations of Agricultural Credit Planning: The Case
of Colombia, Savings and Development. Vol. IV, No. l, 1980. pp. 52-62.
34For a collection of articles on value-chain finance see journal, Enterprise Development
& Microfinance Vol. 18, No. 2/3, September 2007 and Vol.19 No. 4, December 2008.
35 Joachim Bald (2009), Stability of Small Balance Deposits, A Technical Note, January

2008, Washington DC: CGAP/World Bank


Hhttp://www.cgap.org/p/site/c/template.rc/1.9.34819/H (last accessed 24 November
2009).
36C. Gonzalez-Vega, G. Chalmers, R. Quiros and J, Rodriguez-Meza (2006) Hortifruiti in

Central America, A Case Study About the Influence of Supermarkets on the Development
and Evolution of Creditworthiness Among Small and Medium Agricultural Producers,
Microreport 57, DAI for USAID
Hhttp://www.microlinks.org/ev02.php?ID=12564_201&ID2=DO_TOPICH (last accessed
17 November 2009).
37Examples of more flexible banks are Peoples Bank and Hatton National Bank in Sri
Lanka.
38
Finance Alliance for Sustainable Trade (FAST) (2009) Presentation to the Specialty
Coffee Association of America. 2009. Survey included Burundu, Kenya, Malawi, PNG,
Uganda, and Zambia.
39Deutsche Gesellschaft fr Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) GmbH. the
development agency owned by the federal German government.
40 Hans Dieter Seibel, Thorsten Giehler and Stefan Karduck (2005) op.cit.
41The Land Bank of the Philippines, in contrast to the other two state-owned Philippine
banks, avoided bankruptcy during the Marcos era because the chairman of the board for
this bank (and not for the others) was the finance minister, who recognised that he would
end up being responsible for covering the losses that the Land Bank would incur if the
typical intrusions were allowed (see Robert C. Vogel and Gilberto M. Llanto, (2006)
Successful experiences of government-owned banks in rural and micro finance: the case
of the Land Bank of the Philippines, Washington DC,USAID).
42 A World Bank project in Nicaragua in the 1990s offered an interesting variation on
liquidation, as branches of the agricultural development bank were offered at auction to
private banks; in towns were there was no private bank, monetary incentives were
offered to private banks to purchase such branches if there were initially no bidders.
43APRACA (Asia Pacific), AFRACA (Africa), NENARACA (Near East North Africa) Rural
and Agricultural Credit Associations, ALIDE (Latin America) Association of Development
Financing Institutions.
44Credit lines for crop production are available in Senegal at 7.5 per cent and in Sri
Lanka at 8 per cent for example, well below market rates of 15 per cent or more.
45 The first major study of transaction costs in agriculture, carried out in Honduras in the
late 1970s by the Rural Finance Group at The Ohio State University, showed quite
precisely the perverse impact of subsidised interest rates on transaction costs, which
rose to the point where equilibrium between supply and demand for the subsidised credit

47 The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
was achieved, with those seeking smaller loans those who were supposed to be
benefiting from the subsidy being rationed out.
46Reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries
(REDD).
47 In the 2008/2009 agricultural season, Malawi is spending $186m to subsidise fertiliser
and seeds for poor farmers, tripling the previous year's figure of $62m. Malawi's success
in this programme, against donor advice, has made the country a grain exporter and
helped contain food costs. The emerging consensus is that such subsidies are essential
for African agriculture. In November the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization
rewarded Malawi President Bingu wa Mutharika, who also serves as his country's
Minister of Agriculture, with the Agricola Prize. In Malawi, moreover, the programme has
more than paid for itself by reducing costs for food imports (Africa Focus Bulletin, 22 Jan
2009).
48 Such investments earn high returns, far greater than the cost of money accessible to

developing countries. The highest are in agricultural research, rural roads and education,
More and Better Investment in Agriculture Policy Brief attached to World Bank (2007), op.
cit.
49 This section draws on World Bank, Agricultural and Rural Development Department

(2007) Providing financial services in rural areas: A fresh look at financial co-operatives,
Report no 40043-GLB, Washington DC, World Bank.
50 Technical assistance over a sustained period from countries with advanced financial

co-operative networks, such as Germany, Canada, Netherlands and the Nordic


countries, has often been a productive intervention.
51 ANDE - Aspen Network for Development Entrepreneurs (2008) Background Analysis

July 11th, 2008, Dalberg Hhttp://www.aspeninstitute.org/policy-work/aspen-network-


development-entrepreneurs/ande-publications-knowledge-libraryH(last accessed 17
November 2009).
52 However good the percentage return from those small deals that succeed, the absolute

profits will not be enough to compensate for the inevitable, and expected, capital losses
from investee failures in the high-risk high-return business of venture capital, as well as to
cover the transaction costs essentially the same for a small deal as for a large one, and
finally the cost of capital, including the managers profit share.
53 Finance Alliance for Sustainable Trade (FAST) www.fastinternational.org
54 Contract-based lending refers to a three-way partnership arrangement whereby credit
is provided based on the value of a buyers order. The lender is paid directly by the
buyer, who subtracts the principal and interest before passing the remaining proceeds
onto the producer group.
55 Brian Milder (2008) op.cit.
56 World Bank (2007), op. cit. p129
57 Kathryn Tully (2008) Investors boost the missing middle Financial Times 24 June;

Root Capital (2009) Root Capital Awarded 2009 Financial Times and IFC Sustainable
Banking Award Press Release: 4 June; Interview (June 2009) with Brian Milder, Director
Strategy and Innovation, Root Capital.
58 Interview Vivek Bharati, PepsiCo India (June 2009) and confidential programme review

PepsiCo Contract Farming in India, IFAD-WFP Management Facility (2008), summarised


in Microinsurance Network Newsletter No. 19, September 2009, p2
Hwww.microinsurancenetwork.org/newltr/fichier/MI_Newsletter_19_EN.pdfH (last
accessed 17 November 2009).

48 The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
59
SBI (State Bank of India) (undated) Financing the agri marketing chain presentation:
Hhttp://www.docstoc.com/docs/10233787/LEADING-LEADING-LEADING-LEADING-
AGRI-BUSINESS-AGRI-BUSINESS-AGRIH (last accessed November 2009).
60 FAO (2008) DrumNet an Enterprising Third Party Transaction Manager, EASYPol

Module 148, January 2008, Rome, FAO.


61 Interview November 2008 with evaluation consultant for Save the Childrens project to

analyze the core conditions for developing a weather insurance market in Mali.
62Lillian Diaz, and Jennifer Hansel, lead authors (2007) Practitioner-Led Action
Research: Making Risk-Sharing Models Work with Farmers, Agribusinesses, and
Financial Institutions. Paper given at FAO International Conference on Rural Finance
Research: Moving Results into Policies and Practice, Rome, January 2007.
63 Hwww.ifc.org/ifcext/sme.nsf/content/LeasingH (last accessed 8 October 2009).
64
Hwww.ifc.org/ifcext/africa.nsf/Content/Leasing_Feature_May07H (last accessed 8
October 2009).
65Factual data on Standard Bank, AGRA, and Equity Banks activities in this section
come from the following sources: (1) Standard Bank of Africa, AGRA, and MCA
Mozambique (2009) op. cit., (2) Rachel Keeler (2009) Africa Agenda: Standard Bank
Ventures into Smallholder Agricultural Financing, Ratio Magazine 23 April 2009
Hwww.ratio-magazine.comH (last accessed 17 November 2009) (3) Josephat Juma
(2009) Public-Private Partnership Targets Smallholder Farmers The African Executive
205, 2501 April 2009
http://www.africanexecutive.com/modules/magazine/articles.php?article=4230 (last
accessed November 2009).
66A 2006 programme in Lesotho, for example, used a 100 per cent government
guarantee to back bank lending, combined with a 30 per cent credit subsidy. Farmers
only had to repay 70 per cent, and will require significant re-education in basic loan
processes.
67Hwww.coton-acp.org/.../Cotton_price_risk_management_World_Bank.pptH (last
accessed 26 October 2009).
68 Standard Bank of Africa, AGRA, and MCA Mozambique (2009), op. cit.
69 B Milder (2008) Reaching the missing middle and rural poor through value chain
finance Enterprise Development & Microfinance, Vol.19, No. 4, December 2008. The
author points out that the bank did not relax its normal fixed asset collateral requirements,
however.
70 Sources: B Milder, op.cit and Rabobank website.
71 USAID (2009) Whats New: Credit Guarantees: Promoting Private Investment in
Development: Year in Review 2008.
Hhttp://www.usaid.gov/our_work/economic_growth_and_trade/development_credit/H
(last accessed 17 November 2009).
72Alternative index measures, not dependent on ground weather stations are being
researched, such as an area-yield index based on field cuttings, or remote satellite
detection of vegetative health, known as a Normalized Difference Vegetation Index.
73 J. Hartell, and J. Skees, (2009), op. cit.
74Jerry Skees (2007) Challenges for Use of Index-Based Weather Insurance in Lower
Income Countries, Lexington: GlobalAgRisk, Inc.
75 Jason Hartell (2009) Presentation on the pre-feasibility of index-based weather

insurance in Mali. GlobalAgRisk, Inc. Bamako, Mali.

49 The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
76Source: Primary interview (June 2009) Vivek Bharati, PepsiCo India, and data collected
by IFAD-WFP Weather Risk Management Facility.
77 Partners are USAID, FAO, ILO, Oxfam America and BASIS at the University of

Wisconsin Hhttp://www.basis.wisc.edu/H (last accessed 17 November 2009).


78Pablo Suarez, Joanne Linnerooth-Bayer and Reinhard Mechler (2007), Feasibility of
Risk Financing Schemes for Climate Adaptation.The case of Malawi. Report prepared for
the World Bank Development Economics Research Group, Laxenburg: International
Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
79As quoted in Oxfam International (2009), Investing in poor farmers pays, Oxfam
Briefing Paper 129, Oxford: Oxfam.
80 Tse-Ling Teh and Alan Martina (2008) Developing countries spreading covariant risk
into international risk markets: subsidised catastrophe bonds or reinsurance, or disaster
assistance?, Working Paper No: 492, Canberra:The Australian National University.
81Sources for Africa Invest material are its website
Hhttp://www.africainvestmw.com/home.phpH Agri Africa Development Plan investor
fundraising brochure http://www.africainvestmw.com/literature/literature.php# (last
accessed November 17 2009) and primary interview October 2009 with Lloyd Barker,
previously Director Farming at Africa Invest.
82 Opportunity International Bank of Malawi. Biometric identification, face and thumbprint
is available for non-literate customers.
83The intention is to turn instead to a mix of development finance institutions, commercial
banks and venure capital. Hhttp://www.africainvestfm.com/index3.htmlH (last accessed
November 17 2009).
84
AgDevCo business plan summary Hwww.agdevco.com/documentsH (last accessed
November 17 2009).
85 Based on article: Developments - AgDevCo - a positive investment approach in difficult
times in New Agriculturist, July 2009.
86 Hhttp://www.agfax.net/radio/detail.php?i=265H (last accessed 17 November 2009).
87AgDevCo Developing Sustainable Agriculture in Africa, Concept Note
http://www.agdevco.com/documents/AgDevCo.pdf
88
Mumbi Kimathi, Mbita Mary Nandazi et al. (2008) Synthesis Report, Africa Agricultural
Value Chain Financing, 3rd AFRACA Agribanks Forum, Nairobi: AFRACA.
89Hhttp://www.technoserve.org/work-impact/sectors/agriculture-agribusiness.htmlH (last
accessed 26 October 2009) & www.ruralforum.info/documents/presentations/wg-
1.5_ogana.pdf(last accessed 26 October 2009).
90 This is typically three to seven years for a venture capitalist who needs it to meet his

funds profit target and recycle capital back to his investors.


91 Information from Grofin and Shell Foundation publications, Grofin investment manager
interview 21 July 2009 in All Africa.com (last accessed 26 October 2009).
92 Minimum investment size for GroFin is $50,000 and agriculture is conspicuously absent
from their list of target sectors.
93Due to the unpredictability, GroFin does not finance primary agriculture or other
speculative projects. For example, given the effects of climate change, it would be hard to
predict profits in primary agriculture. We do however finance secondary agricultural
activities when there is value addition to the primary agricultural produce, explained
Guido Boysen [chief investment officer GroFin], interview with All Africa Com, 21 July
2009 Hhttp://allafrica.com/stories/200907211088.htmlH (last accessed 23 October 2009).

50 The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
94Given that loan reporting is computerised, there should be no extra cost to banks or the
credit bureau from handling data on small loans as well as large. A bonus is the
opportunity this gives supervisors to check bank reporting for completeness, including
loans to related parties often omitted.
95
Roger D Norton (2004) Agricultural development policy: concepts and experiences,
Chichester, John Wiley & Sons Ltd/FAO.
96 Heywood Woody Fleisig and Nuria de la Pena, at the Center for the Economic

Analysis of Law (CEAL), Washington DC, have carried out studies on how to improve
collateralisation, including for moveable property, in several countries, mainly in Latin
America, but implementation has seldom resulted.
97 For more detail on risk-based supervision, see Tom Fitzgerald and Robert C. Vogel

(2000) Moving Towards Risk-Based Supervision in Developing Economies Harvard


Institute for International Development, CAER II Discussion Paper No. 66, May 2000.
98The complexities of implementing supervisory policies that are at least neutral with
respect to a formalistic approach to examinations was shown in the Philippines when
bank examiners were explicitly allowed flexibility in classifying small loans that were
without normal documentation or collateral. Nonetheless, examiners maintained strict
standards, recognising that if a loan that they had viewed flexibly later became a problem
loan, the problem became their problem.
99CGAP/DFID (2009) Scenarios for Branchless Banking in 2020, Focus Note 57, October
2009.
100Robert C. Vogel, (2008) Mobile Phone for Banking Transactions in the Philippines:
Can this Innovation Reach Unserved Areas with Financial Services paper prepared for
the Gates Foundation conference, February 2008.
101Ali Zayad (2008) An overview of Agricultural Financing Products of SCB Pakistan
presentation, 1st September 2008, Karachi, Standard Chartered Bank Pakistan.
102Hellene Karamagi and Lillian Nalumansi No more spilt milk: Mobile phones improve
the supply of milk to the market in Uganda ICT Update: a current awareness bulletin for
ACP agriculture, 47 Hhttp://ictupdate.cta.int/en/Feature-Articles/No-more-spilt-milkH (last
accessed 26 October 2009).
103IFAD (2009) The future of world food security: Investing in smallholder agriculture
an international priority, Hhttp://www.ifad.org/hfs/index.htmH (last accessed 17
November 2009).
104 Standard Bank of Africa, AGRA, and MCA Mozambique (2009), op. cit.
105Christie Peacock (2009) Africa: Farming sense OECD Observer
Hhttp://www.oecdobserver.org/news/fullstory.php/aid/1617/Africa:_Farming_sense_.html
H (last accessed 24 November 2009).
106Javier Blas (2009) G8 admits losing battle against hunger, Financial Times 20 April.
Hhttp://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3db36d9c-2da7-11de-9eba-00144feabdc0.htmlH (last
accessed 24 November 2009).
107 Al Gore and Ban Ki-Moon (2009) Green growth is essential to any stimulus FT.com.

16 February 2009http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0fa98852-fc45-11dd-aed8-
000077b07658.html (last accessed 24 November 2009).
108 This is more likely to occur if government initiatives include inappropriate interventions
in financial markets.
109The Economist (2009) Green Shoots 19 March 2009
http://www.economist.com/node/13331189 (last accessed 24 November 2009).

51 The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
110 Hhttp://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-20664767.htmlH and

Hhttp://www.financialexpress.com/news/pepsico-to-sell-seasons-harvest-to-lt-
overseas/390581/H (last accessed 17 November 2009).
111 Rachel Keeler (2009) op.cit.
112 Anne Perkins (2008) op.cit.
113 World Bank (2007) op. cit.
114
FAO (2009) quoted in Africa Invest (2009) Africa Agri Development Plan April 2009,
Hhttp://www.africainvestmw.com/literature/literature.php#H(last accessed November 17
2009).
115 Standard Bank of Africa, AGRA, and MCA Mozambique (2009) op. cit.
116Farmers apply about 9 kg/ha of fertilizer in Africa, compared to 86 kg/ha in Latin
America, 104 kg/ha in South Asia, and 142 kg/ha in Southeast Asia: Source: Study
quoted in Jonathan Agwe, Michael Morris, And Erick Fernandes (2007) Africas Growing
Soil Fertility Crisis: What Role For Fertilizer? Agricultural and Rural Development Notes
Issue 21 May 2007, Washington DC: World Bank.
117 World Bank (2007) op.cit.
118Source: NEPAD [The New Partnership for Africa's Development] Secretariat (2005)
Agribusiness, supply chain, and quality control initiative CAADP implementation concept
note (Midrand, South Africa, 2005).
119 World Bank (2007) op.cit.
120 Kathryn Tully op.cit.
121In the drive to seek higher returns and improve microfinances standing as an asset
class some commercial investors and their MFI investees have seriously departed from
the original concept. Especially since the Compartamos MFIs stock market flotation in
May 2007, there has been sharp controversy in the microfinance world over how to
balance access to large-scale capital with preservation of the mission to provide
affordable and appropriate personal financial services for people living in poverty.
122 World Bank Group announcement June 8 2009.
123
Root Capital (2009) Root Capital Announces Launch of Innovative Five-year $63m
Growth capital Campaign, Press Release, 26 March 2009 Hwww.rootcapital.orgH (last
accessed 17 November 2009).
124
Calvin Miller and Carlos Da Silva (2007) Value Chain Financing in Agriculture
Enterprise Development & Microfinance Vol. 18, No. 2/3, June/September 2007.
125
FAST (2009) Guarantee Facility for Social Lending at
Hhttp://www.fastinternational.org/en/node/65H (last accessed 27 October 2009).
126Directed lending to agriculture and other priority sectors at below market rates has
long been a policy in India, but banks have not always met their quotas, there is evidence
of widespread corruption in credit allocation and small farmers still suffer credit
shortages. See for example: India Knowledge at Wharton article 15 November 2007
Raghuram Rajan on Rewriting the Rules for Indias Banks
Hhttp://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/india/article.cfm?articleid=4239H (last accessed
November 23 2009) and Priya Basu (2006), Improving Access to Finance for Indias
Rural Poor, Directions In Development 36448, Washington DC: World Bank.

52 The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the following people who were interviewed for this publication.

Lloyd Barker, ex-Director of Farming, Africa Invest


Vivek Bharati, PepsiCo India
Emma Caddy, ERM Foundation Low Carbon Enterprise Fund
Dan Gies, ShoreBank International
Henry Gonzales, Morgan Stanley
Susan Johnson, Dept of Economics and International Development, Bath University
John May, New Ventures Group and World Business Angels Association
Brian Milder, Root Capital
Roy Parizat, Finance Alliance for Sustainable Trade
Duncan Parker, Africa Invest Fund Management

The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009
Oxfam GB December 2009
Oxfam GB is a member of Oxfam International. Registered charity no. 202918.
This paper was written by Alan Doran, Ntongi Mcfadyen, and Robert Vogel. Oxfam
GB acknowledges the assistance of Katie Allan, Robert Bailey, Sam Bickersteth,
David Bright, Constantino Casabuenas, Nicholas Colloff, Penny Fowler, Duncan
Green, Thalia Kidder, and Hugo Sintes in its production. It is part of a series of
papers written to inform public debate on development and humanitarian policy
issues.
The text may be used free of charge for the purposes of advocacy, campaigning,
education, and research, provided that the source is acknowledged in full. The
copyright holder requests that all such use be registered with them for impact
assessment purposes. For copying in any other circumstances, or for re-use in
other publications, or for translation or adaptation, permission must be secured and
a fee may be charged. E-mail publish@oxfam.org.uk
For further information on the issues raised in this paper please e-mail
enquiries@oxfam.org.uk or go to www.oxfam.org.
The information in this publication is correct at the time of going to press.
Oxfam is a registered charity in England and Wales (no 202918) and Scotland
(SCO 039042). Oxfam GB is a member of Oxfam International.

The Missing Middle in Agricultural Finance,


Oxfam GB Research Report, December 2009

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